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From: earl@mips.COM (Earl Killian)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards,comp.arch
Subject: Re: Jerry Pournelle on UNIX (From BYTE)
Message-ID: <1424@gumby.mips.COM>
Date: 28 Jan 88 08:29:37 GMT
References: <1495@osiris.UUCP: <2126@haddock.ISC.COM> <1497@osiris.UUCP> <704@PT.CS.CMU.EDU>
Lines: 19

Conditional symbolic links sound a little strange to me.  How about
instead the following idea from the ancient past:

The ITS operating system had both symbolic links and things called
translations.  Symbolic links were more heavily used, but you could do
cute things with translations, which were essentially per-process
renamings.  The best way to describe ITS translations to the Unix
community would be to say they were a per-process sed script applied
to every filename passed to the kernel.  As such you can modify a
filesystem (from your perspective at least) that you don't have access
to.

This very general facility could replace lots of special-purpose
hacks.  Suppose you wanted to change rm.  Adding an alias, or an rm
command in your path doesn't suffice because some scripts etc. say
/bin/rm.  So you add s|^/bin/rm$|/user/me/bin/rm| to your translation
list.  The csh ~ hack could be done by having s|^~|/user/me|, and then
it wouldn't be limited to csh command lines.  The system V TMPDIR
environment variable would be unnecessary.  Etc. etc.