Traversing symlinks

[Sune Foldager]

On 19-05-2011 22:56, Matt Mackall wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-05-19 at 21:22 +0200, Sune Foldager wrote:
>> On 19-05-2011 19:42, Martin Geisler wrote:
>>> Isaac Jurado<diptongo at gmail.com>   writes:
>>>> Superusers can hard-link a directory? Excuse me, but I'm lost at this
>>>> point:
>>>>
>>>>       root at findus:~# mkdir testdir
>>>>       root at findus:~# ln testdir link_to_testdir
>>>>       ln: `testdir': hard link not allowed for directory
>>>
>>> My manpage has
>>>
>>>           -d, -F, --directory
>>>                 allow  the  superuser  to attempt to hard link directories (note:
>>>                 will probably fail due to system restrictions, even for the supe-
>>>                 ruser)
>>>
>>> It failed for me when I tried it:
>>>
>>>     $ ln foo bar -d
>>>     ln: creating hard link `bar' =>   `foo': Operation not permitted
>>>
>>
>> It (somewhat limited) supported on Mac OS X.
>
> And even these aren't actually hardlinks (ie arbitrary graph-like
> connections in an otherwise tree-shaped directory structure), they're
> just presented as hardlinks to userspace.

Well, hardlinks have been tagged onto HFS+ later on in general, so I 
guess you could say they are not "true", but I think that's a matter of 
definition.

> Among other things, tools like
> find have a finite run-time with them. Try mounting an HFS+ drive with a
> Time Machine backup under Linux (or reading Apple's tech notes on them)
> and you'll see what I mean.

Yeah, I'll just do that... or wait, no. (what does 'finite run-time' 
mean anyway? As opposed to 0?)

:) s