Re: symbolic links & `..' entry

[Pierre THIERRY]

Scribit Ivan Shmakov dies 09/02/2007 hora 01:32:
>       Now, $ ls z/ will show us `y', just as expected.  Would `..' be
>       interpreted lexically, it would break the things,

But you're talking about a symlink, which is precisly an abstraction in
the FS. That is, the application doesn't know it's accessing a symlink,
so there's to interpretation of .. at all.

When in a/b, and I ask a link z to ../x, I'm lexically asking my shell
to create a link a/b/z to a/x. There is no need for the system to keep
track that it was ../x at the time of it's creation, AFAIK.

>       I guess, there could be some examples related to the use of GNU
>       Arch, since it depends on ascending directory tree recursively
>       to get access to its control files, `{arch}/'.

Would you really set up file links in a version controlled directory
hierarchy in a way that lexical directory ascending wouldn't make it to
the root of the working copy?

>       ... Doesn't it look like both interpretations could be useful?

I'm not really convinced so far by the need of a physical .. entry.

Curiously,
Pierre
-- 
nowhere.man@levallois.eu.org
OpenPGP 0xD9D50D8A

signature.asc
Description: Digital signature