On Friday 12 February 2010 06:06 AM, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
> On Friday 12 February 2010 07:23:02 Suvayu Ali wrote:
>> $ ln muse test
>> ln: `muse': hard link not allowed for directory
>>
>> So I did a little searching and found its not exactly a forbidden. So
>> far the closest to an understandable explanation/reasoning I came across
>> was a discussion in lwn[1]. So my question is how are hardlinks so
>> different from softlinks?
>
> If you are familiar with the concept of memory pointers in some (any)
> programming language, this is basically the same thing.
>
> A hard link is a pointer to some data on the disk.
>
> A soft link is a pointer to a pointer.
This is a wonderful example! This made it much easier for me to
understand. :)
> Now, hard links are not allowed for directories since they would allow for
> creation of loops (a directory containing itself), which is a Bad Idea, since
> it breaks recursion. The filesystem needs to be a *tree* if recursion is to
> function, so loops are forbidden (how would you delete a directory which
> contains itself?).
I don't quite follow you here, don't you mean hardlinking directories
have the risk of introducing recursion?
> However, soft links to directories are allowed, since they are just pointers
> to other pointers, which makes them distinguishable from regular pointers
> (hard links), and thus recursion algorithms can work around them ("don't
> follow a symbolic link when recursing" is a typical option you can find in a
> man page of various tools).
Yup! got it. :)
>
> HTH, :-)
> Marko
>
Thanks
--
Suvayu
Open source is the future. It sets us free.
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