From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Nov 27 10:40:23 1995 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id KAA19153 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 27 Nov 1995 10:40:23 -0800 Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.211]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with ESMTP id KAA19066 for ; Mon, 27 Nov 1995 10:40:12 -0800 Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id LAA19215; Mon, 27 Nov 1995 11:34:53 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199511271834.LAA19215@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: How can I remove hard links between directories? To: davidg@root.com Date: Mon, 27 Nov 1995 11:34:53 -0700 (MST) Cc: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, bob@luke.pmr.com In-Reply-To: <199511270945.BAA00128@corbin.Root.COM> from "David Greenman" at Nov 27, 95 01:45:51 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 1059 Sender: owner-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk > >> > Help! An apparently buggy version of afio that I was running has > >> > created some hard links between a couple of directories on my system > > > >David? Didn't we nuke the ability to hard-link directories some day > >in 1.1.5.1? Should we nuke this again? > > I endured a significant amount of pain from all of the criticism of that > change. While I think it's bogus to allow hard directory links in FFS, some > other people disagree. ...but I think the other people are wrong, so yes, I > think we should "nuke" them again. :-) I definitely agree with this. If you nuke directory hard links, it's possible to maintain parent pointers and quickly reverse traverse the directory hierarchy. And doing that is useful to no end. 8-). I personnally used this technique with the justification that directories aren't files to implement a directed revers graph traversal for trustee support in a UNIX FS. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.