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"Symbolic links make the Unix file system non-hierarchical, resulting in multiple valid path names for a given file." http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/p
by dtf 15y ago
"Symbolic links make the Unix file system non-hierarchical, resulting in multiple valid path names for a given file."
http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/lexnames http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/lexnames
- reinhardt 15y agoDoesn't this specific criticism hold for hard links too?
- lyso 15y agoIt's mitigated in that you can't hard link a directory (except in recent MacOS). So I suppose you would always know the real cwd of your shell, for instance.
- protomyth 15y agoadding OS X hard link discussion: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/80875/what-is-the-bash-command-to-create-a-hardlink-to-a-directory-in-os-x http://stackoverflow.com/questions/80875/what-is-the-bash-co...
- uriel 15y agoThere are other problems with symlinks too: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/symlinks http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/symlinks Every command that operates on files needs an extra flag to tell it whatever it should follow symlinks, or operate on the target, or on the symlink itself, etc.
- mansr 15y agoOnly commands capable of doing something meaningful with symlinks need such a flag. These are a minority.
- uriel 15y agoAny program that manipulates or traverses file trees is affected, and a few more, in an OS that is built around the concept of hierarchical file systems, this is quite a few.
- barrkel 15y agoThat's rather the point. When presenting a view of the file system under some particular directory, it's nice to not have to hard-link every file into place, and instead include wholesale directory trees. That's my most common use case for symlinks.