Just curious: why is /usr/bin/python not a symlink?
Roy Smith
roy at panix.com
Fri Feb 24 08:17:25 EST 2012
In article <ji7fbd$drj$1 at r03.glglgl.gl>,
Thomas Rachel
<nutznetz-0c1b6768-bfa9-48d5-a470-7603bd3aa915 at spamschutz.glglgl.de>
wrote:
> Not only that, [hard and symbolic links] have slightly different
> semantics.
This is true, but only for very large values of "slightly".
Symlinks, for example, can cross file system boundaries (including NFS
mount points). Symlinks can refer to locations that don't exist! For
example:
~$ ln -s foobar foo
~$ ls -l foo
lrwxr-xr-x 1 roy staff 6 Feb 24 08:15 foo -> foobar
~$ cat foo
cat: foo: No such file or directory
Symlinks can be chained (i.e. a symlink points to someplace which in
turn is another symlink). They're really very different beasts.
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