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From: mangler@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu (System Mangler)
Newsgroups: net.unix,net.unix-wizards
Subject: Re: Are links as useful as they could be?
Message-ID: <1059@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Date: Mon, 20-Oct-86 00:59:52 EDT
Article-I.D.: cit-vax.1059
Posted: Mon Oct 20 00:59:52 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 21-Oct-86 22:17:05 EDT
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Summary: symbolic links shouldn't have been inodes

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

Warts... you can't chmod, chgrp, utime, or link them.
The access time never means much, because doing an
"ls -l" to see it has the side effect of changing it.

Symbolic links are too expensive to use freely.  They take up
an inode and 1K of disk space, just to hold a few characters.
They carry all the baggage of a regular inode (atime, mtime,
links, owner, group, mode) but you can't make proper use of
any of it.

Since Berkeley was making directory entries variable length
anyway, why didn't they just make symbolic links a variant
type of directory entry, containing a string instead of an
inode number?  They might be twice the size of a normal
directory entry, but the time saved in not having to read
another inode would be a big win.

Don Speck   speck@vlsi.caltech.edu  {seismo,rutgers}!cit-vax!speck