Re: Proposal: restrict link(2)

Snow Cat (snowcat@netgate.net)
Sun, 15 Dec 1996 10:57:25 -0800 (PST)


Harald Koenig once wrote:
>
> I'm always asking *why* (for which reason, or maybe better which purpose)
> something is done/allowed/not allowed/implemented/...
>
> for the question "why is a user allowed to create hard like to files of other users"
> I haven't found any positive answer yet (please don't tell me
> "that's UNIX fs semantics" again;)
>
> and I found/read no answer so far what we'd break if we would change
> the behaviour of link(). I still think that it *absolute* no
> real application will be affected...
>

Hard links are pretty useful for sharing large files. When I was in
university, I used to make links to large programs compiled by other
users - like gdb, irc, etc. In this way it didn't take any additional
disk space and if the owner deleted the program later, I still had a
copy.

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