From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Dec 26 12:31:47 1996 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.4/8.8.4) id MAA06294 for hackers-outgoing; Thu, 26 Dec 1996 12:31:47 -0800 (PST) Received: from alpo.whistle.com (alpo.whistle.com [207.76.204.38]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.4/8.8.4) with ESMTP id MAA06289 for ; Thu, 26 Dec 1996 12:31:43 -0800 (PST) Received: from current1.whistle.com (current1.whistle.com [207.76.205.22]) by alpo.whistle.com (8.8.2/8.8.2) with SMTP id MAA29473; Thu, 26 Dec 1996 12:27:55 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: <32C2DF8C.167EB0E7@whistle.com> Date: Thu, 26 Dec 1996 12:26:52 -0800 From: Julian Elischer Organization: Whistle Communications X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0Gold (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2-CURRENT i386) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Charles Owens CC: J Wunsch , FreeBSD hackers , ben@narcissus.ml.org Subject: Re: multi-group file access techniques / directory hardlinks References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Charles Owens wrote: > 1. The file system does in fact support directory hardlinks. (This is > true at least to some extent, since the '.' and '..' entries are, > in fact, directory hardlinks.) see below. > > 2. Certain key tools do _not_ understand directory hardlinks. The ones > that I know of are fsck, rm, and rmdir. > > 3. The official FreeBSD stance (that I seem to be hearing) that > directory hardlinks are unsupported is based on: > > a. the insufficient status of the tool support (previous point) > - and/or - > b. the fact that directory hardlinks are dangerous in the > hands of the uncareful. > > Am I correct here? Would someone in the know provide clarification? the KERNEL now disallows the 'link' operation on directories. > > As I stated in my original posting (on Dec 18), my goal is to come up with > an optimum technique for allowing multiple groups controlled access to a > file tree. (To my surprise, I had very little response to this posting, > which deals with what I think is a rather interesting challenge. If you'd > like me to repost, please holler). Essentially I'm trying to achieve a > subset of the functionality offered by Access Control Lists as implemented > in AIX et al. I never saw the original posting.