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From: guy@sun.uucp (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: net.unix,net.unix-wizards
Subject: Re: symlinks as directory entries vs. inodes
Message-ID: <8829@sun.uucp>
Date: Mon, 3-Nov-86 02:57:05 EST
Article-I.D.: sun.8829
Posted: Mon Nov  3 02:57:05 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 4-Nov-86 05:06:53 EST
References: <21127@rochester.ARPA> <65@its63b.ed.ac.uk>
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> >I presume they just decided the added benefits weren't worth the hassle.
> 
> What are the benefits supposed to be again?

Well, to quote from the article that claimed they had added benefits:

> 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>
> Organization: California Institute of Technology
> 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 Don Speck was a defender of the "symbolic links as special directory
entry" idea, while I was not, I'll let him argue the point further.  Note,
however, that one of the objections - the first one listed - was not one of
resource consumption, but one of transparency.
-- 
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy@sun.com (or guy@sun.arpa)