Re: FS: hardlinks on directories

Stephan von Krawczynski
2003-08-04T13:56:08Z

On Mon, 4 Aug 2003 15:44:15 +0200
Andries Brouwer <aebr@win.tue.nl> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 04, 2003 at 02:15:48PM +0200, Stephan von Krawczynski wrote:
>
> > although it is very likely I am entering (again :-) an ancient discussion I
> > would like to ask why hardlinks on directories are not allowed/no supported
> > fs action these days.
>
> Quite a lot of software thinks that the file hierarchy is a tree,
> if you wish a forest.
>
> Things would break badly if the hierarchy became an arbitrary graph.

Care to name one? What exactly is the rule you see broken? Sure you can build
loops, but you cannot prevent people from doing braindamaged things to their
data anyway. You would not ban dd either for being able to flatten your
harddisk only because of one mistyping char...
Every feature can be misused and then damaging, but that is no real reason not
to have it - IMHO.

Regards,
Stephan