On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 9:26 AM, Marc Herbert <marc.herb...@gmail.com> wrote: > Le 06/05/2010 15:53, Peng Yu a écrit : >> Suppose that I have a symbolic link link1 pointing to file1. When I >> write to link1, I don't want file1 change. I want it to remove the >> link generated a new file and write to it. > > This is a very strange question. Symbolic links are expressly designed > to fool everyone. Why are you using symbolic links if you do not want > to be fooled? > > Please give more details about what you are trying to do.
Suppose I have N files in a directory that does some job. Lets say M (<N) files are primary files and N-M files are derived from these M files (say, there are a number of programs, each takes some of the M files to generate some of the N-M files). For my problem, there is no easy way, for example to use file suffix, to figure which of these N files are primary and which are derived. Suppose I need to modify one primary file slightly to do something a little bit different. But I still need to do the original job, therefore I need to keep it the original M files. I can copy the whole directory and then modify one file in the newly copied N files. But I'll lose track of which file has been changed later on, which is important to me. Instead, I'd rather create symbolic link for all the N-M-1 primary files but copy only one remaining file and modify it. Remember, I can't tell which are primary files and which are derived files. So I can not do so. One solution is create symbolic link to N-1 files as long as I can overload '>' and '>>' and the open file function call. This is why I ask the question in the OP. Let me know if you have any thought on solving this problem. -- Regards, Peng