On Thu, 27 May 2010 12:59:33 PDT Chad Brown <yand...@mit.edu> wrote: > On May 26, 2010, at 10:48 PM, ron minnich wrote: > > > Don't change your use of symlinks. I meant more as a global thing: see > > Korn's paper "Symlinks are a botch". > > Can I beg a specific title or reference? My efforts with google turned = > up primarily references to your original post (and a former US = > Ambassador to Togo). > > Thank you, > *Chad
I think Ron was referring to Korn's 1987 usenet posting, where Korn said "the implementation of symbolic links on BSD Unix is a botch". Not exactly the same thing. If BSD had implemented ".." correctly (i.e. walk back up one level in the given path), symlinks would have been more useful and less surprising. But for that they would have had to store current dir path in the kernel; which was not a popular idea then (or even now as it seems /bin/pwd has to grovel around reconstructing $PWD path painfully). And a limit of 8 indirect symlink was hokey. Detecting loops isn't hard.
