Re: FS: hardlinks on directories

Stephan von Krawczynski
2003-08-04T14:50:08Z

On Mon, 4 Aug 2003 15:04:28 +0100 (BST)
Anton Altaparmakov <aia21@cam.ac.uk> wrote:

> For a start the kernel VFS dcache would break because you end up with
> multiple entries for each inode, one entry for each parallel directory
> tree. Read-only you are just about able to get away with it (been there,
> done that, don't recommend it!) but allow files to be deleted and it will
> blow up in your face.

I cannot comment, I have no inside knowledge of it.

> You ask for examples of applications? There are millions! Anything that
> walks the directory tree for a start, e.g. ls -R, find, locatedb, medusa,
> du, any type of search and/or indexing engine, chown -R, cp -R, scp
> -R, chmod -R, etc...

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?

My saying is not "I want to have hardlinks for creating a big mess of loops
inside my filesystems". Your view simply drops the fact that there are more
possibilities to create and use hardlinks without any loops...

Regards,
Stephan