Vikram Goyal wrote: > Rummaging through the man pages and pondering over the problem I came > across ln man page. An excerpt: > > -d, -F, --directory > allow the superuser to attempt to hard link directories > (note: will probably fail due to system restrictions, > even for the superuser) > > So I tried it as super user but failed miserably. Then I thought if the > option is there then there must exist a possible way of usage. Please note that the ln command and associated manpage come from the GNU project. As such, they are certainly not Linux-specific. I understand that many of the GNU utilities pre-date the Linux kernel: they were certainly designed to install on a large number of weird and less-than-wonderful archaic systems. (And this was common, especially on systems which saw a lot of interactive shell use). So the "possible way of usage" could include "using GNU ln on a different system with a different C library and a different kernel". To the best of my knowledge, this *is* the only way. The e-mail at http://lwn.net/Articles/100184/ dates from August 2004, but Linus Torvalds explicitly says: The general VFS layer has a lot of rules, and avoids these problems by simply never having aliases between two directories. If the same directory shows up multiple times (which can happen with bind mounts), they have the exact same dentry for the directory, it's just found through two different vfsmount instances. That's why vfsmounts exist - they allow the same name cache entry to show up in different places at the same time. In other words, if a directory is hard linked, it's a kernel bug. James. -- E-mail address: james | You know you've been computing too long when you see a @westexe.demon.co.uk | BBC News headline "MS damage repair mechanism found", | and wonder why that's news. Then you wonder why it's | listed under Health...
