Re: FS: hardlinks on directories

Andrew Pimlott
2003-08-05T01:24:04Z

On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 02:19:38AM +0200, Stephan von Krawczynski wrote:
> On Mon, 4 Aug 2003 18:58:19 -0400
> Andrew Pimlott <andrew@pimlott.net> wrote:
> >
> > 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. :-(
>
> Ok, so now we are at: application programmer expected hardlinks to exist, but
> fs programmer says they won't because they break existing applications.

I would say that a few venerable programs, that have seen wide use
on old broken versions of unix, contain workarounds for this
problem. I'm sure that most applications don't contain such
workarounds. And it is expensive, so I would certainly prefer that
my find and ls didn't do this.

> Now the discussion gets real interesting ;-)

Wouldn't bind mounts solve your problem? Why are you still
interested in hard links?

Andrew