Re: [PATCH] 2.5.14 IDE 56

Linus Torvalds
2002-05-07T18:16:30Z

On Tue, 7 May 2002, Alan Cox wrote:
>
> > > Fugly. What's wrong with readlink(2) as this "magic syscall"?
> > Ehh - like the fact that it doesn't work on device files?
>
> I can't find anything in Posix/SuS that says it isnt allowed to however 8)

We can certainly do it, it just doesn't buy us much of anything, since
none of the standard tools (ie "ls") will actually do the readlink() for
anything but a symlink.

So at that point it's just another magic syscall, except we've overloaded
an old one.

Which may certainly be acceptable, of course.

Linus