On Mon, 11 Jul 2005, Steve Holdoway wrote:
On Mon, July 11, 2005 8:30 am, John Carter said:
The file pointed to doesn't have to exist, or may exist on a different
drive. The symlink itself is not a file, it is merely a tweak inside a
directory file.
Err... a hard link is a duplicate entry to a pre-existing inode entry on
that partition. That said, the file *must* exist before hard linking to
it.
Yup, I was talking about symbolic links (symlink) not hard. Destination of
hardlink must exist and exist on the same partition. Destination of
shambolic link needn't be on same partition, or same drive or even exist.
Now that I have spotted my mistake and seen that symlinks have there own
inode number. Question for the group:
Without writing my own code, how can I open the symlink file (not the
file it points to) with something like "od" to see whats inside it?
Fascinating, I can use the command inode-cat to do this to a conventional
file, but it freaks with a lseek error if I point it at a symlink inode.
John Carter Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639
Tait Electronics Fax : (64)(3) 359 4632
PO Box 1645 Christchurch Email : [EMAIL PROTECTED]
New Zealand
Carter's Clarification of Murphy's Law.
"Things only ever go right so that they may go more spectacularly wrong later."
From this principle, all of life and physics may be deduced.
