On Monday 30 April 2007 11:13, Carlos E. R. wrote: > The Monday 2007-04-30 at 16:55 +0200, jdd wrote: > > I never really understood was arise, but I think I had cross links > > (links from a partitio to an other and vice-versa) > > It is safe to copy "the link" but not the file that the link is > pointing to. On the other hand, when doing a backup, you might find > out that the backup is full of links which are not saved elsewhere... > so one has got to be careful.
It's important to distinguish hard links from symbolic links. Hard links are fundamentally restricted from ever crossing file system / device / volume boundaries. This is because all the hard links to a file are co-equal. It's not that one is "the file" and others are "links." This kind of link is the reference from a directory entry to an inode and takes the form of a simple integer index in the inode table. Because it has this form, in which the device / file system volume is implicit and must be equal to the one on which the directory entry resides. Manually created hard links cannot refer to directories. The only hard links to directories are those created automatically when directories are created or moved (specifically, the link from the parent to the directory, the "." entry in the directory and the ".." entries in all immediate sub-directories). Symbolic links _are_ asymmetric. A symbolic link is quite distinct from the entity to which it refers (which may by any kind of file system entity, including directories). A symbolic link is just a plain file that contains a substitute file name (relative or absolute) to use when the symlink is accessed. Symbolic links may cross file system boundaries because there referents (the thing to which they point) have no implicit component or aspect other than the directory in which the symlink resides in the case that the symlink's value is a relative path name. > -- > Cheers, > Carlos E. R. Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
