Are links as useful as they could be?

[ECSC68 S Brown CS]

In article <21127 at rochester.ARPA> ken at rochester.UUCP (Comfy chair) writes:
>
>There still is obviously a need for some kind of indirection mechanism.
>I don't like symbolic links, there are some warts, like having to check
>for looping, but I can't think of anything better.

The "check for looping" could be fixed for symbolic links by defining
some primitive that converts a filename into the filename that it
"really is" -- ie, it does the work that it does internally in order
to do things like open(), execle(), etc... on a symbolic link.
lstat() is fine but it only does one level of translation.



--
Simon Brown
Computer Science Dept.
University of Edinburg.