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Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watnot!watmath!clyde!cbatt!cwruecmp!hal!ncoast!allbery
From: allbery@ncoast.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.bugs.sys5
Subject: Unlinking "."
Message-ID: <2284@ncoast.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 4-Apr-87 10:30:57 EST
Article-I.D.: ncoast.2284
Posted: Sat Apr  4 10:30:57 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 5-Apr-87 13:00:48 EST
References: <1059@cci632.UUCP>
Reply-To: allbery@ncoast.UUCP (Brandon Allbery)
Followup-To: comp.bugs.sys5
Organization: Cleveland Public Access UN*X, Cleveland, Oh
Lines: 37

As quoted from <1059@cci632.UUCP> by rrw@cci632.UUCP (Rick Wessman):
+---------------
| Is it possible under vanilla System V to unlink "."? We have
| the source, and from what I can tell, it is legal.
+---------------

Dunno about non-root, but --

Once I was trying to relink our kernel and (being that there was not enough
documentation, Plexus Tech Support finally set me right about :mkuts68; you
did the "make" directly under Plexus Sys3) passed make the wrong arguments.
It unlinked .. and I had to manually relink it -- fsck didn't even complain
about it.

+---------------
| If it is legal, should it be OK to be able to remove it when the
| directory is not empty?
+---------------

A directory is an ordinary file, except that nobody can write to it and
only root can link/unlink it (I hope!).  I think that link() and unlink()
should fail on directories and that mkdir() and rmdir() should be system
calls.  Now if only we had source (Plexus gives you conf.c and name.c, plus
lots of object libraries and low.s, but no kernel source).

++Brando
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