On 12/16/11 10:37, Bob Proulx wrote: > an example of the behavior from a BSD system showing the > restriction through a symlink's permissions.
In BSD systems a symlink's permissions do not restrict anything. They exist, and can be changed, and you can look at them with ls -l, but they have no effect on what you can do with the symlink. I do recall an alternative implementation where you could not use readlink without read permission to the symlink, and you could not follow the symlink with search (x) permission. But I don't remember which one that was; perhaps it was just experimental. In NTFS symbolic permissions have a different interpretation, which I don't know much about and may not be relevant here.
