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Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!ncar!oddjob!gargoyle!att!ihnp4!chinet!les
From: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Newsgroups: comp.bugs.4bsd,comp.bugs.misc,comp.bugs.sys5
Subject: Re: Hard Links between UNIX Utility Programs
Message-ID: <6103@chinet.chi.il.us>
Date: 27 Jul 88 03:02:30 GMT
References: <184@chip.UUCP>
Reply-To: les@chinet.chi.il.us (Leslie Mikesell)
Organization: Chinet - Public Access Unix
Lines: 22

In article <184@chip.UUCP> mparker@chip.UUCP (M. D. Parker) writes:
>I have noticed the tendency for some programs in UNIX to have hard links.
>The program operation is then determined by the name it was invoked by.
>As a system administrator this makes it very difficult for me to restrict
>one program without restricting all their linked set.  And the problems
>is not just simply removing the hard link, since experimentations have
>proved that symbolic links do the same.  Thereby preventing restriction
>again.

The file permissions are stored in the inodes, and to get another inode
you have to duplicate the data...

Starting with link-a and link-b as two different links to the same file:

rm link-b
cp link-a link-b

Now the files are no longer linked and you can chown/chmod independently.
Unfortunately, you also use extra disk space for each copy and do not
gain the advantage of shared-text when multiple copies are running when
invoked by the different names.

Les Mikesell