From owner-freebsd-current Fri Jun 15 6:36:34 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mailman.zeta.org.au (mailman.zeta.org.au [203.26.10.16]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 219A437B403 for ; Fri, 15 Jun 2001 06:36:31 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from bde@zeta.org.au) Received: from bde.zeta.org.au (bde.zeta.org.au [203.2.228.102]) by mailman.zeta.org.au (8.9.3/8.8.7) with ESMTP id XAA26916; Fri, 15 Jun 2001 23:34:52 +1000 Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 23:33:07 +1000 (EST) From: Bruce Evans X-Sender: bde@besplex.bde.org To: Richard Tobin Cc: "Andrey A. Chernov" , Adrian Browne , freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: tcsh.cat In-Reply-To: <200106151308.OAA07742@rhymer.cogsci.ed.ac.uk> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Fri, 15 Jun 2001, Richard Tobin wrote: > > P> The string pointed to by path1 shall be treated only as a character > > P> string and shall not be validated as a pathname. > > I have heard on several occasions of peope using symlink(2) to > atomically store some small piece of information for locking purposes. > (Symlink was more reliably atomic over NFS than other methods.) So it > is possible that changing this might break something. Yes. /etc/malloc.conf is another example (for non-locking purposes). Here's an example of a complication: what is the semantics of /tmp/foo/bar where foo is a symlink to ""? I think the pathname resolves to /tmp//bar and then to /tmp/bar, but this is surprising since foo doesn't point anywhere. Similarly, /tmp/bar/foo resolves to /tmp/bar/ and then to /tmp/bar (/tmp/bar must be a directory to get that far). Bruce To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message