Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!dptg!ulysses!andante!mit-eddie!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!mcsun!ukc!slxsys!jonb From: jonb@specialix.co.uk (Jon Brawn) Newsgroups: comp.unix.internals Subject: Re: How do you find the symbolic links to files. Message-ID: <1990Nov27.155015.24837@specialix.co.uk> Date: 27 Nov 90 15:50:15 GMT References: <1990Nov26.082214.17329@oracle.com> <1990Nov26.150716.7268@specialix.co.uk> <1990Nov26.193324.5396@decuac.dec.com> Organization: Specialix International, London Lines: 57 mjr@hussar.dco.dec.com (Marcus J. Ranum) writes: >jonb@specialix.co.uk (Jon Brawn) writes: >>[...] How do I access a symbolic link >>file to find out that it IS a symbolic link (I mean from within C, I >>assume stat( char *filename ) is going to stat the pointed too file?) > use lstat(2), of course. Thanks. >>Does 'find' have a wonderful flag for finding symlinks? > read the manual page on find(1). Hmm. And? SCO Unix doesn't appear to document it - hang on a mo I'll look at Interactive... ...nope. So, having RTFM, I find nothing useful. The question remains unanswered. >>Also, what about old crusties like 'tar' and 'cpio'? What do they do? > tar and cpio [assuming on cpio - I don't use it] use lstat(2) >instead of stat(2), as they should. tar also keeps a table of the inode >#s of files it has already dumped, and makes a note to make a hard link >to the file instead of just storing 2 copies. I know how tar and cpio handle regular files and device nodes. I want to know about symbolic links. I would hope that tar would copy the contents of the file. That would be do much more useful than trying to do a restore, and discovering that what you thought you had backed up as /usr/data_base/main_data_file was in actual fact just a sixty four character pathname to an obscure corner of the file system, and that you had, in fact, lost everything in the last crash... ...but I guess tar will probably just backup the symbolic path name anyway. >mjr. >-- > Good software will grow smaller and faster as time goes by and >the code is improved and features that proved to be less useful are >weeded out. [from the programming notebooks of a heretic, 1990] So, in summary: I asked (quite nicely) how you played with symbolic links at a fairly nuts'n'bolts level, and got told to RTFM. Now, TFMs don't mention it because symbolc links are not in the ``currently popular'' releases. I tell people to RTFM on a regular basis. I don't (usually) need to be told to do it myself. When something new comes along, I like to be able to ask those more priviledged than myself for enlightenment, so they can look in their manuals and say, 'Theres this new O/S call that is dead ace, it's just like stat, but different, you give it a file name, and it gives you the *real* info on the file'. So, whats the real truth about find, cpio & tar? how do they behave? -- Jon? -- jonb@specialix.co.uk "Never be sorry for a might have been."