Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!think!ames!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: rm etc. (was: Nasty Security Hole?)
Message-ID: <8962@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 23 Nov 88 06:25:58 GMT
References: <175@ernie.NECAM.COM> <189@wyn386.UUCP> <8910@smoke.BRL.MIL> <118@hudson.Morgan.COM> <8941@smoke.BRL.MIL> <816@hadron.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>)
Distribution: na
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 15

In article <816@hadron.UUCP> jsdy@hadron.UUCP (Joseph S. D. Yao) writes:
-The confusion is boosted along by all those texts that explain the
-Unix tree-structured file system with a box at the top labelled "/"
-and lines to other boxes named "bin", "tmp", etc.  This is wrong, of
-course: the names go on the lines ...

100% right.

The UNIX file system design of inode data-objects (the "flat file
system") and multiple links to them (the "(sort of) hierarchical file
system", actually constrained to be a DAG (no relation)) is interesting
and useful, and deserves to be studied in its own right.  An attempt to
establish a conceptual mapping between this scheme and another file
system implementation that has a different structure must at some
point be misleading.