On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 06:13:53PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > 3) normally, readlink(2) fails for non-symlinks. Moreover, according to > > POSIX it should do so (with -EINVAL). > > I don't think POSIX is necessarily relevant here. > > We have had magic file behavior outside the scope of POSIX before, and > we will have it in the future. It makes perfect sense to use > readlink() for management tools for automounting, even if the normal > oepration is to treat the thing as a directory. > > Not everything is within the domain of POSIX.
How would those tools know that this particular pathname _is_ a magical symlink? Sure, if you see a symlink with body that starts with % or #, you could figure out that it's not a regular one and go parse the body, but for stat(2) it looks like a directory. Do those tools call readlink() on every directory they spot on AFS volume? David? And what's the story with magical ->open() for those? How could one get to ->open() on those sucker and avoid triggering the automount instead? -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
