Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!dptg!ulysses!andante!alice!andrew
From: andrew@alice.UUCP (Andrew Hume)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Hard links to directories: why not?
Summary: no more complicated than sym lnks
Keywords: ln, directories, security...
Message-ID: <11070@alice.UUCP>
Date: 20 Jul 90 05:27:58 GMT
References: <5222@milton.u.washington.edu> <6940@eos.UUCP> <1990Jul19.115622.14015@mips2.cr.bull.com>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill NJ
Lines: 13



as everyone has said, you don't want hard links to dirs
because the tree'ness of the file system gets buggered.
on the other hand, links to files already do that to some extent.
and symbolic links do it completely as you can symlink to directories.
allowing hard links to dirs makes the problem no worse, really.
and in fact, it may help because maybe then all the tree traversal code
everyone implements on their own will get buggered enough that everyone
will use the one routine (say ftw) which can do it right (as best it can, anyway).
	the hard program to write and define semantics for has always been pwd.
some unixes remember how you got to a directory and use that knowledge
to interpret .. while most look up the file system. it all depends on what you want.