-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 According to Paul Eggert on 3/16/2005 1:53 AM: >>$ touch a >>$ ln -s a b >>$ ln b c # Bug: c should be a hard link to a, not b >>$ ls -l a b c >>-rw-r--r-- 1 eblake None 0 Mar 15 19:04 a >>lrwxrwxrwx 2 eblake None 1 Mar 15 19:04 b -> a >>lrwxrwxrwx 2 eblake None 1 Mar 15 19:04 c -> a > > It does seem to be a messy area. It's not clear to me that POSIX was > intended to specify what it does. Personally I prefer the GNU "ln" > behavior, on hosts that support hard links to symlinks: it's much > cleaner and easier to explain. > One more point to consider. With GNU behavior, the next command of `rm a' leaves both `b' and `c' as dangling pointers, and loses the file; while with POSIX behavior, `rm a' leaves `b' dangling, but `c' still contains the contents of `a' so no data has been lost (provided you know its alternate name). It comes down to a question of whether creating the hard link named c should preserve the metadata (b is a symlink to a) or the data (the contents of a), when someone is using hard links to avoid data loss. Both behaviors seem reasonable, so it is probably worth a command-line option in ln.
> Maybe this should be brought before the POSIX committee? > I agree, and just posted the issue to the austin group. - -- Life is short - so eat dessert first! Eric Blake [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.0 (Cygwin) Comment: Public key at home.comcast.net/~ericblake/eblake.gpg Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFCODqn84KuGfSFAYARAmw3AKDQ/RUwsJHr0JbWTLbwMYln7IsRRQCgxfS5 Je7Wcyqot1gBGAiQWqLrCoM= =wV/t -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils