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Re: Realpath & context sensitive symlinks
- To: James Antill <james at and dot org>
- Subject: Re: Realpath & context sensitive symlinks
- From: Daniel Jacobowitz <drow at mvista dot com>
- Date: Thu, 27 Sep 2001 22:22:49 -0400
- Cc: Michael Eager <eager at mvista dot com>,Glibc Alpha <libc-alpha at sourceware dot cygnus dot com>
- References: <3BB372A6.D33CBCEE@mvista.com> <nnr8sspcl3.fsf@code.and.org>
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.
--
Daniel Jacobowitz Carnegie Mellon University
MontaVista Software Debian GNU/Linux Developer