Re: FS: hardlinks on directories

Andrew Pimlott
2003-08-04T23:03:48Z

On Mon, Aug 04, 2003 at 04:50:02PM +0200, Stephan von Krawczynski wrote:
> There is a flaw in this argument. If I am told that mount --bind
> does just about what I want to have as a feature then these
> applictions must have the same problems already (if I mount
> braindead). So an implementation in fs cannot do any _additional_
> damage to these applications, or not?

There is a flaw in this flaw. :-)

/tmp# mkdir a
/tmp# mkdir a/b
/tmp# mkdir a/c
/tmp# mount --bind a a/b
/tmp# ls a
b c
/tmp# ls a/b
b c
/tmp# ls a/b/b/
/tmp#

It is enlightening in this regard to consider the difference between
using unix /etc/fstab and Hurd translators to manage your namespace.

In preparing this example, I discovered that find and ls -R already
have hard-link cycle "protection" built in, so they are broken in
the presence of bind mounts. :-(

Andrew