4 ms·

I'm not sure I follow the argument about symbolic links. What do they have to do with the root UNIX thinking that it owns the whole filesystem? I don't often se

I'm not sure I follow the argument about symbolic links. What do they have to do with the root UNIX thinking that it owns the whole filesystem? I don't often see symlinks used in the context of crossing "imported" (mounted?) parts of the filesystem - instead, I use them most often to provide aliases so that the same file/directory can be accessed with multiple names.

jgtrosh 7y ago
Also, I sometimes have files cross-referenced with a different indexing or names through symbolic links; is there a better UNIX way of doing that?
enneff 7y ago
If you want the same thing to have multiple names you can just use a hard link. Symlinks are a broken idea in Plan9 because whether they’re relative or absolute they may not point to the same thing depending on how you have your namespace set up. In plan9 each user has their own set of bound file systems (like mounts, but for users not the system as a while), and so has their own logical view of the local and remote file systems, applications, devices, and so on, all presented as a file system rooted at /. It’s a very powerful and elegant design. Symbolic links are kind of stupid and broken in that context.
- brianpgordon 7y ago
  On Unix I much prefer using symlinks to hard links. Hard links are super confusing when you don't know/remember that they're there. AFAIK there's no easy way to get ls to display them for what they are. If you suspect that something is a hardlink you have to squint at the inode numbers and see if you have duplicates. But if you use symlinks, ls will just tell you, and give you both the link name and destination by default. I suppose you could use ls_colors to colorize hard links to make them more visible, but then you have to configure that on every server you ssh to.

4 ms·

I'm not sure I follow the argument about symbolic links. What do they have to do with the root UNIX thinking that it owns the whole filesystem? I don't often se

by brianpgordon 7y ago

jgtrosh 7y ago
Also, I sometimes have files cross-referenced with a different indexing or names through symbolic links; is there a better UNIX way of doing that?
enneff 7y ago
If you want the same thing to have multiple names you can just use a hard link. Symlinks are a broken idea in Plan9 because whether they’re relative or absolute they may not point to the same thing depending on how you have your namespace set up. In plan9 each user has their own set of bound file systems (like mounts, but for users not the system as a while), and so has their own logical view of the local and remote file systems, applications, devices, and so on, all presented as a file system rooted at /. It’s a very powerful and elegant design. Symbolic links are kind of stupid and broken in that context.
- brianpgordon 7y ago
  On Unix I much prefer using symlinks to hard links. Hard links are super confusing when you don't know/remember that they're there. AFAIK there's no easy way to get ls to display them for what they are. If you suspect that something is a hardlink you have to squint at the inode numbers and see if you have duplicates. But if you use symlinks, ls will just tell you, and give you both the link name and destination by default. I suppose you could use ls_colors to colorize hard links to make them more visible, but then you have to configure that on every server you ssh to.