Once upon a time Dave Ihnat wrote:
[...]
> Kernighan, Ritchie, Thompson, et. al. originally implemented the
> concept of a hard link only. They considered the equivalent of what
> would eventually became a symlink too hard to maintain reliably, and
> felt it would lend itself to abuse--in fact, the symlink, eventually
> implemented at Berkeley, has become called in some circles the "goto of
> the filesystem".
>
> Their implementation was to simply create another special file, with its
> primary data element a path to the referenced file. And yes, K&R and
> Dennis were right--it does get "stale", is harder to maintain, etc.
>
> But damn, it's been useful, too.
>
> Hope this bit of background helps put things in perspective...
The only thing I'd like to add to your excellent exegesis is that many
Unix ideas derived from Multics. The symbolic link is certainly
one. Multics didn't have hard links per se, but it did have the
facility for adding names to files or directories: the differences
being a) all the names appeared in the same place and b) there were no
reference counts - delete the file by any of its names and it
went. You could simply remove a *name* though, without removing the
data too.
--
|Deryk Barker, Computer Science Dept. | Music does not have to be understood|
|Camosun College, Victoria, BC, Canada| It has to be listened to. |
|email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | |
|phone: +1 250 370 4452 | Hermann Scherchen. |
--
PLEASE read the Red Hat FAQ, Tips, Errata and the MAILING LIST ARCHIVES!
http://www.redhat.com/RedHat-FAQ /RedHat-Errata /RedHat-Tips /mailing-lists
To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with
"unsubscribe" as the Subject.
