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From: simon@its63b.ed.ac.uk (ECSC68 S Brown CS)
Newsgroups: net.unix
Subject: Re: Are links as useful as they could be?
Message-ID: <65@its63b.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Thu, 2-Oct-86 11:07:17 EDT
Article-I.D.: its63b.65
Posted: Thu Oct  2 11:07:17 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 7-Oct-86 23:12:21 EDT
References: <21127@rochester.ARPA>
Reply-To: simon@its63b.ed.ac.uk (Simon Brown)
Distribution: net
Organization: I.T. School, Univ. of Edinburgh, U.K.
Lines: 18

In article <21127@rochester.ARPA> ken@rochester.UUCP (Comfy chair) writes:
>
>There still is obviously a need for some kind of indirection mechanism.
>I don't like symbolic links, there are some warts, like having to check
>for looping, but I can't think of anything better.

The "check for looping" could be fixed for symbolic links by defining
some primitive that converts a filename into the filename that it
"really is" -- ie, it does the work that it does internally in order
to do things like open(), execle(), etc... on a symbolic link.
lstat() is fine but it only does one level of translation.



--
Simon Brown
Computer Science Dept.
University of Edinburg.