> Hi, > > I wanted to create hardlinks for directories on the same file system. > I know it's not allowed. But the man page for ln says one may. Now I > want to know how may one switch it on. > > Also what could be the pitfalls. Many years ago, with no previous experience with multiuser, general purpose computer systems designated as the system administrator for a shiny new DEC VAX running 4.1c (or was it 4.1a) BSD UNIX. I decided that I needed to know about UNIX so I started learning-by-doing the various commands available at the command line while the actual users plowed ahead on the design of a network of early supercomputers and supporting devices. Eventually I stumbled (tripped?) over the link command (ln). I went into /usr/src/ and created the following: /usr/src/a - a real directory /usr/src/b - a hard link to a /usr/src/c - a hard link to b /usr/src/d - a hard link to c /usr/src/e - a hard link to d /usr/src/f - a hard link to e I thought, "This is pretty interesting." I moved around this structure for a while, creating files, removing them using pathnames different from the one I used to create them. Then I tried to remove the directories /usr/src/[abcdef]. No joy. No matter what command or in what order the various forms of rmdir or "rm -r" I tried worked. The OS reported that the target directory was not empty and so could not be removed in every case. So looking around I discovered the clear inode command, and it seemed a perfect solution to my problem, after all I couldn't leave this bogus structure handing around in the file system, could I? I cleared a few inodes then tried to verify the non-existence of the linked directories. The system crashed like a rock. Oh, oh! I was going to be exposed as an ignorant fool of a system administrator. I had just thrown the other 15-20 users off. So I lept to my feet, and shouted, "OK, who did that?" [The best defense being a good offense.] When no one answered, I went about the task of overseeing the reboot. I think this qualifies to illustrate a pitfall. It was not long after my foolishness that hard links between directories was no longer possible with out extraordinary action, which I do not recall or even know if is still possible. It is not clear to me why symbolic links would not work as well for you. After my little adventure I can think of very few occasions when I used hard as opposed to symbolic links, and symbolic links exclusively for directories. ;-) dlg > Thanks! > -- > vikram... > |||||||| > |||||||| > ^^'''''^^||root||^^^'''''''^^ > // \\ )) > //(( \\// \\ > // /\\ || \\ > || / )) (( \\ > -- > Faster, faster, you fool, you fool! > -- Bill Cosby > -- > O > ~|~ > = > Registered Linux User #285795 > > -- > fedora-list mailing list > fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx > To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
