Re: FS: hardlinks on directories

Stephan von Krawczynski
2003-08-05T00:19:48Z

On Mon, 4 Aug 2003 18:58:19 -0400
Andrew Pimlott <andrew@pimlott.net> wrote:

> 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. :-(

Ok, so now we are at: application programmer expected hardlinks to exist, but
fs programmer says they won't because they break existing applications.
Now the discussion gets real interesting ;-)

Regards,
Stephan