Re: Realpath & context sensitive symlinks

[Andreas Schwab <schwab at suse dot de>]

Daniel Jacobowitz <drow@mvista.com> writes:

|> On Thu, Sep 27, 2001 at 05:07:20PM -0400, James Antill wrote:
|> > Michael Eager <eager@mvista.com> writes:
|> > 
|> > >                                                       This macro 
|> > > substitution only occurs when the file system is following a symlink, 
|> > > otherwise the macro is left unmodified.
|> > 
|> >  Why? Is it done just so you can display it "raw" in ls. I can't think
|> > of any other use for the "raw" value and a bunch of things probably
|> > rely on stuff being valid from readlink() (just hope nothing changes
|> > uid etc. before it uses them).
|> 
|> We've (often and vocally) wondered the same thing :)  It's completely
|> POSIX conformant, regrettably; at least as far as I can tell.  The
|> value returned from readlink () is not required to be "useful" in any
|> real sense.

And hasn't been already for a long time on Linux as well, just look at the
symlinks in /proc/$PID/fd if the file is a pipe or socket, or points to a
deleted file.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab                                  "And now for something
Andreas.Schwab@suse.de				completely different."
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