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From: jas@rtech.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: symbolic links are a botch
Message-ID: <912@rtech.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 14-Jun-87 18:08:44 EDT
Article-I.D.: rtech.912
Posted: Sun Jun 14 18:08:44 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 16-Jun-87 01:27:25 EDT
References: <2629@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com> <390@murphy.UUCP> <898@rtech.UUCP> <8689@tekecs.TEK.COM>
Reply-To: jas@rtech.UUCP (Jim Shankland)
Organization: Relational Technology, Alameda CA
Lines: 39

In article <8689@tekecs.TEK.COM> snoopy@doghouse.gwd.tek.com (Snoopy) writes:
>In article <898@rtech.UUCP> jas@rtech.UUCP (Jim Shankland) writes:
>>Minor point relating to this discussion:  it's not symbolic links
>>per se that are a botch, it's allowing links (symbolic or not)
>>to directories.
>
>But, *not* allowing symlinks to directories would be a botch!
>Everyone repeat after me:
>
>	"Everything is a file."
Original point was only that it is not the "symbolic-ness" of the link
that is at issue; all the complaints about symbolic links (whether or
not they are justified) are really complaints about links to
directories.

Repeating that everything is a file, whether or not it is true, is not
a useful exercise.  A terminal is a file, but I can't seek on it;
a (vanilla) pipe is a file, but I can neither seek on it nor name it;
/etc/passwd is a file, but I can't mount it; the swap partition is a file,
but I can't put it into cbreak mode; and so on.
>
>Symlinks to directories [examples omitted] ... are extremely useful....
>
>Yes, the "cd .." and "pwd" stuff can get a bit confusing.... How about
>adding options to cd and pwd (and whatever) to specify going up rather
>than back?  [yeah, I know, Yet Another Option :-( ]  Sometimes it would
>be handy to get pwd to tell you both paths.

In general, having turned the name space into a dag (graphs with cycles,
not being well-formed name spaces, are not considered), there may be more
than two ways "up;" "pwd" could output arbitrarily many paths.  Sure,
links to directories are useful; but they also lead into a semantic swamp.
I'm not advocating a particular solution (don't have one); just trying
to clarify the problem.
-- 
Jim Shankland
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