From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Nov 28 05:47:01 1995 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id FAA06375 for hackers-outgoing; Tue, 28 Nov 1995 05:47:01 -0800 Received: from godzilla.zeta.org.au (godzilla.zeta.org.au [203.2.228.19]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with ESMTP id FAA06370 for ; Tue, 28 Nov 1995 05:46:57 -0800 Received: (from bde@localhost) by godzilla.zeta.org.au (8.6.9/8.6.9) id AAA31258; Wed, 29 Nov 1995 00:39:16 +1100 Date: Wed, 29 Nov 1995 00:39:16 +1100 From: Bruce Evans Message-Id: <199511281339.AAA31258@godzilla.zeta.org.au> To: davidg@Root.COM, terry@lambert.org Subject: Re: How can I remove hard links between directories? Cc: bob@luke.pmr.com, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk >> >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 don't think you really want to remove the ".." links. That would be a lot of work. >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. There's nothing to stop you doing that anyway. Directory links other than to the parent only occur in damaged file systems. File systems without ".." links are inconvenient to traverse in user code. The hack for determining leaf directories doesn't work, so everything must be stat()ed to determine if it is a directory. Bruce