A suggestion: .... == ../../..

Rahul Dhesi dhesi at bsu-cs.UUCP
Wed Apr 20 08:05:55 AEST 1988


In article <1934 at bgsuvax.UUCP> kutz at bgsuvax.UUCP (Kenneth Kutz) writes:
>This would seem to be only a matter of creating a third link (in addition
>to the 2 that get created now "." and "..") which would be "..." for
>grandparent etc....
>There's nothing special about . and ..  There just directory entries
>with the same inode number (links) to another directory entry.

There is something very special about "." and "..".  Programs that
traverse directory trees know not to get into infinite loops by
traversing "." and ".." also.  If there were a third hard link called
"...", such programs would loop endlessly unless they were modified.

Consider "rm -r subdir", for example.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi         UUCP:  <backbones>!{iuvax,pur-ee,uunet}!bsu-cs!dhesi



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