site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-dev@lists.apple.com On Sep 20, 2006, at 12:48 AM, Pelle Johansson wrote: - the difference between a symbolic and a hard link is mostly in implementation (the former gets you cross-device linking, and can "break"; the latter is confined to one device and won't break). -- Steve Checkoway _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-dev mailing list (Darwin-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-dev/site_archiver%40lists.appl... This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com Justin C. Walker wrote: The idea is that you can refer to the collection of bytes that works out to "hello world\n" by the name 'foop' and I can refer to it as 'goop', and we really don't know that those two different names are the same file (unless we do some detective work (using 'ls')). If you type "ls -lL foop", you get the information about the file; the name remains the same because that is how you refer to it. I'd suggest everyone who thinks this is confusing read the stat(2) manpage and consider that without -L lstat is used, but with it stat is. I'm well aware of how files and links work and I know the difference between lstat and stat. My objection was to the man page. I think the gnu man page more accurately captures the distinction. After all, passing -L to ls does nothing without -l. After all, what does it mean to "list" a file if not to display the name? The -l option is for listing in the long format. On Sep 19, 2006, at 8:18 PM, Justin C. Walker wrote: I disagree. While both of those properties of links are true, I wouldn't say that's the difference. As I'm sure you well know, a hard link is just another link to the same inode with a different path. I know that either HFS or OS X (I'm not sure which) has issues with files that have at any point been hard linked whereas a symbolic link is a different file which points to a path (as can be read by readlink (2)). There is no difference between an original link to a file and a hard link to the file. For all intents and purposes, they are the same file. This is not true of a symlink. To quote from symlink(7), "A hard link to a file is indistinguishable from the original file because it is a reference to the object underlying the original file name." "A symbolic link contains the name of the file to which it is linked, i.e. it is a pointer to another name, and not to an underlying object." smime.p7s