Re: FS: hardlinks on directories

Randolph Bentson
2003-08-04T23:00:40Z

On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 12:32:10AM +0200, Stephan von Krawczynski wrote:
> And in just the same way fs could provide a mode bit saying "hi, I am a
> hardlink", and tar can then easily provide option number 1345 saying
> "stay away from hardlinks".

Perhaps not a bit, but rather another enumerated value in the type field
of an inode. (Are there any values left?)

Ok, lets consider this. Suppose that /a/b and /a/c both refer to the same
directory, where /a/b is a traditional link, but /a/c is a "hardlink".

What happens when one executes 'rmdir /a/b'? Does the directory it
references disappear? If not, how would tar ever find it? (I have
this vision of a disk full of these hardlink-only directories which
tar and perhaps fsck cannot find.)

--
Randolph Bentson
bentson@holmsjoen.com