Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!torsqnt!lethe!yunexus!shields
From: shields@yunexus.YorkU.CA (Paul Shields)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Hard links to directories: why not?
Keywords: ln, directories, security...
Message-ID: <12952@yunexus.YorkU.CA>
Date: 21 Jul 90 05:49:58 GMT
References: <5222@milton.u.washington.edu> <1990Jul18.235607.19403@virtech.uucp> <3070@unisoft.UUCP>
Reply-To: shields@nccn.yorku.ca
Organization: York U. Computing Services
Lines: 31

[alt.security removed]..

greywolf@unisoft.UUCP (The Grey Wolf) writes:
[.. good advice about chroot security and rename deadlock.. ]

>Well, it IS the user's privilege to make up a convoluted directory struc-
>ture in his own namespace, but using symbolic links.  They're much more
>easy to try and resolve, since you don't have to do an ncheck to find out
>which directories have such-and-such an inode.

>Now, WHY a user would need to make a namespace convoluted escapes me, but
>the world is full of oddities, now, ain't it?

Convolutions such as cycles aside, 
the reason would be to store things non-hierarchically.

Many sites place source in /usr/local/src, but some use
/usr/src/local. Or put man pages in /usr/local/man vs. /usr/man/local.
as also /usr/bin/local and /usr/local/bin.  And why is /usr in front
of all of these?  It makes no logical sense.

Hierarchical organization for this is more tradition than real.  And
it gets more convoluted with /usr/local/lib/tex/bin, ad nauseum...
people begin to have diffculty finding their way around. I provide
links to reduce the impact of guessing.

But the only use I ever found for cyclic directory structure was to
annoy system administrators.

Paul Shields
shields@nccn.yorku.ca