On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 2:37 PM, Ben Finney <ben+pyt...@benfinney.id.au>wrote:
> Dan Stromberg <drsali...@gmail.com> writes: > > > It's been suggested that *ix has hardlinks because someone thought up > > hardlinks before someone thought up symlinks - IOW, there are those who > > suggest that if people had added symlinks first, no one would've bothered > > adding hardlinks. > > Well, that suggestion is faulty. It ignores the fact that *all* ordinary > files on Unix are hard links. Any ordinary file entry in a directory is > a hard link to the file's data. > Not really. Whether hard links is supported is mostly a matter of what filesystem you are using - in modern times. It's true that filesystems with complete POSIX semantics probably all support hardlinks, but that's far from every file on any given *ix. And of course, POSIX doesn't appear to have been created until the late 1990's. > The “hard links” capability, therefore, isn't something that was added; > it's fundamental to Unix filesystems from their inception. > Hard linking was reportedly in Unix Version 1, but I see nothing indicating it was in the original Unics of 1969. Then again, I don't see much of anything on the net about what was and wasn't in Unics. > The ‘ln’ command adds *additional* hard links to an existing file's > data; but, once added, they're exactly the same as any other ordinary > file entry. > Well, if you're in a filesystem that supports hardlinking anyway. Supporting that isn't inherent. It requires some sort of on-disk representation for persistence, and not all filesystems support that. > > Symlinks are almost always more flexible, and almost always more > > clear. > > Yet many tools don't work as expected with symbolic links which will > work with an ordinary file (a “hard link”). One can argue that such > tools are to that extent buggy, but symbolic links produce deliberately > different behaviour which is sometimes not what one needs. > Please recall that I was paraphrasing someone saying that hardlinks were seldom better, not never better. I don't know that there's anything in your post that addresses that. It's much easier to imagine a system with no hardlinks, than to imagine a system with no symlinks.
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