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From: guy%gorodish@Sun.COM (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Symbolic Links
Message-ID: <27128@sun.uucp>
Date: Wed, 2-Sep-87 18:49:19 EDT
Article-I.D.: sun.27128
Posted: Wed Sep  2 18:49:19 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 5-Sep-87 07:44:34 EDT
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> -> Imagine, my system (HP9000/530 with HP-UX, a very good System V.2 with
> -> Berkeley enhancements) does not have "." and "..":
>
> That's funny, we have an HP9000/320 and two HP9000/350s running HP-UX
> and all 3 have . and ..

Nothing particularly funny about that at all.  Some HP9000 models - the 530 may
be one of them - run a UNIX that is built on top of a special kernel.  Those
models are the ones built out of what I have heard referred to as the "Focus"
chipset, which is a proprietary chipset implementing what is, I believe, a
stack machine.  The underlying file system of those machines, as implemented
atop that special kernel (which I have heard referred to as the "Sun kernel" -
no relation, as far as I know) is not any well-known UNIX file system; the UNIX
file system operations are implemented atop that file system.  I think they
also implemented a specialized BASIC system atop that kernel as well; I don't
know whether it was originally intended to have UNIX put atop it, or whether
that was done later.

I seem to remember somebody from HP indicating that this kernel's file system
doesn't implement "." or ".." directly, and that they don't fully emulate them;
this may explain why they don't show up when you read the directory.
Presumably, they are handled correctly when they appear in a pathname.

Other HP9000 models use 68020s; there may be other 68K models, and I think
there are also Spectrum (Precision Architecture) models.  I believe all of
those run UNIX directly.
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy@sun.com