Re: st_nlink of directory nodes in shadowfs

[Thomas Bushnell, BSG]

Roland McGrath <roland@frob.com> writes:

> I think the principle of least astonishment dictates that the default
> behavior of existing tools match what they do on existing systems.
> That is, S_ISDIR should be the usual test applied by find and the
> like.  I for one will be annoyed if I do "find . -name \*.o -print |
> xargs rm" and it goes into my translator-provided tar-file directories
> and removes the backup copies of my .o files.  

Ok, this is a compelling argument.  So that means the default should be
to key off of S_ISDIR.  (And, as I said, we should be sure that *all*
recursive-descent shell commands do the *same* thing [chmod -R, etc].)

> GNU find certainly ought to have switches to make possible all the
> permutations of what you might really want to do given the Hurd
> filesystem semantics.  That includes a switch to descend non-S_IFDIR
> directories, akin to `-follow' for descending symlinks to directories,
> as well as a switch to use O_NOTRANS, etc.

Excellent.  Again, let's work out a good name for the switch, and then
work on adding it not just to find, but chmod/chown/chgrp/ls, etc.

Thomas