Differences between version 5 and predecessor to the previous major change of SymLink.
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| Newer page: | version 5 | Last edited on Saturday, October 4, 2003 3:11:00 am | by AristotlePagaltzis | Revert |
| Older page: | version 4 | Last edited on Saturday, October 4, 2003 1:06:06 am | by CraigBox | Revert |
@@ -3,5 +3,5 @@
Using links (whether they be hard or symbolic ones) you can break the strictly hierarchical structure of a FileSystem.
Most file related [system calls | syscalls(2)] like open(2) and stat(2) will operate on the referenced file instead of the link itself. Some of them have "SymLink-aware" counterparts that will operate on the SymLink itself instead, eg lstat(2) which [stat(2)]s the link instead of the linkee.
-Comparable
to Windows's (GUI) idea of a
"shortcut
".
+Though similar on the surface, [SymLink]s have little
to do with [
Windows]
' "shortcuts
" which are not supported at system call level. They're simply another plain file - for an application to work on the linkee rather than the shortcut itself, the programmer must add support for reading and honouring shortcuts to the application. Unlike [SymLink]s they're therefor rather limited in usefulness
.
