Re: [RFC] readlink()-related oddities

David Howells
2015-11-20T10:00:52Z

Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk> wrote:

> How would those tools know that this particular pathname _is_ a magical
> symlink? Sure, if you see a symlink with body that starts with % or #,
> you could figure out that it's not a regular one and go parse the body,
> but for stat(2) it looks like a directory. Do those tools call readlink()
> on every directory they spot on AFS volume? David?

It has to be a directory so that you can mount on it. If you look in /afs on
an OpenAFS client filesystem it appears as a symlink to somewhere under /afs/
because they can't do the in-kernel mounting (it's GPL-only on Linux).

David