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From: guy@gorodish.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: symbolic links are a botch
Message-ID: <21104@sun.uucp>
Date: Mon, 15-Jun-87 14:40:12 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.21104
Posted: Mon Jun 15 14:40:12 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 17-Jun-87 01:44:58 EDT
References: <2629@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com> <390@murphy.UUCP> <898@rtech.UUCP> <912@rtech.UUCP>
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Disallowing symbolic links to directories simply won't fly.  For one
thing, it's difficult, if not impossible, to forbid:

	$ >foo			# create plain file
	$ ln -s foo bar		# make "bar" a symlink to "foo"
	$ rm foo; mkdir foo	# now "bar" is a symlink to a directory

or

	$ ln -s foo bar		# make "bar" a symlink to a nonexistent file
	$ mkdir foo

Disallowing symbolic links to nonexistent files - or, in fact, doing
ANY checking of the contents of the symbolic link - would tick off a
lot of people.  For example, I think the ISIS user-level distributed
file system library supports symbolic links to remote files; the
syntax for remote files is some sort of "host:pathname" syntax.

Symbolic links to directories may be a pain, but it's a pain we'll
have to live with unless we forbid symbolic links completely.
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy@sun.com