So, the symlink is for us lazy programmers? <grin>. I guess the makefile for something with hardlinks would include an "ln" to reassign the hardlinks once the new program is written to disk.
-- John McKown Systems Engineer IV IT Administrative Services Group HealthMarkets(r) 9151 Boulevard 26 * N. Richland Hills * TX 76010 (817) 255-3225 phone * (817)-961-6183 cell [email protected] * www.HealthMarkets.com Confidentiality Notice: This e-mail message may contain confidential or proprietary information. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply e-mail and destroy all copies of the original message. HealthMarkets(r) is the brand name for products underwritten and issued by the insurance subsidiaries of HealthMarkets, Inc. -The Chesapeake Life Insurance Company(r), Mid-West National Life Insurance Company of TennesseeSM and The MEGA Life and Health Insurance Company.SM > -----Original Message----- > From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:[email protected]] On > Behalf Of Fuzzy Logic > Sent: Monday, January 04, 2010 4:05 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: Philosopy question: hardlink vs. symlink > > A hardlink is marginally more work because it could require walking > the directory chain more than once. A hardlink has an inode pointer in > it already, so once you've found the file and have permission to it, > you don't need to look anymore. For a symlink, you have to walk the > path again to find the "real" file referred to in the symlink. > > As long as the tool that updates a file doesn't unlink one of the > hardlinked members, a change to one would be reflected in the others. > > However, most compilers do just that on the final step to create the > binary which would break the connection. > > A snippet from strace -f gives: > > 26090 stat64("myexec", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=14773, ...}) = 0 > 26090 lstat64("myexec", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=14773, > ...}) = 0 > 26090 unlink("myexec") = 0 > 26090 open("myexec", O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC|O_LARGEFILE, 0666) = 3 > > A symlink would be blissfully unaware of the file changing > underneath it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
