Dan Stromberg <drsalists@gmail.com> writes:
On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 2:37 PM, Ben Finney <ben+python@benfinney.id.au>wrote:
Dan Stromberg <drsalists@gmail.com> writes:
It's been suggested that […] if people had added symlinks first, no one would've bothered adding hardlinks.
Well, that suggestion is faulty. It ignores the fact that *all* ordinary files on Unix are hard links. Any ordinary file entry in a directory is a hard link to the file's data.
Not really. Whether hard links is supported is mostly a matter of what filesystem you are using - in modern times. It's true that filesystems with complete POSIX semantics probably all support hardlinks, but that's far from every file on any given *ix. And of course, POSIX doesn't appear to have been created until the late 1990's.
POSIX didn't create those semantics, though; it formalised semantics that were already long-time convention. My only point was that, unlike symbolic links, hard linking isn't some added feature, it's a property of the way Unix filesystems represent normal files. And you're right that I mean “on filesystems with POSIX semantics”.
It's much easier to imagine a system with no hardlinks, than to imagine a system with no symlinks.
Why imagine? There have been many of both. -- \ “But it is permissible to make a judgment after you have | `\ examined the evidence. In some circles it is even encouraged.” | _o__) —Carl Sagan, _The Burden of Skepticism_, 1987 | Ben Finney