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Re: bug: hard links to soft links do not work


Sam,

The hard link to the symlink is made somewhat "blindly" in that the ".lnk" suffix that indicates that the link target is itself a symlink is not automatically added to the newly created hard link. Since the interpretation of a file's contents as a symbolic link is not based on any content signature (such as, say, a magic number) but rather only by the extension, a hard link without the ".lnk" (or, equivalently, a shortcut file renamed to omit the ".lnk" extension) will not be interpreted as a symbolic link.

Thus the binary junk you saw was the shortcut / symlink contents themselves.

At the end of the series of commands you gave (using an NTFS file system, of course), this is the result (note the "inode" numbers in the left column):

% ll -i foo 1 2 3
6537940 -rw-rw-r-- 2 RSchulz None 4 Aug 1 12:34 1
10863326 lrwxrwxrwx 2 RSchulz None 82 Aug 1 12:34 2 -> 1
10863326 -r-xr-xr-x 2 RSchulz None 82 Aug 1 12:34 3*
6537940 -rw-rw-r-- 2 RSchulz None 4 Aug 1 12:34 foo

My hunch is that a patch gratefully accepted for this situation would be an addition to the "ln" command that detected when the target was a Windows shortcut-based Cygwin symlink and in that case supplied the ".lnk" extension if it was not already present in the specified new link name.

Randal Schulz
Mountain View, CA USA


At 11:19 2002-08-01, Sam Steingold wrote:
cygwin does not handle hard and soft links together:

$ echo "foo" > foo
$ ln foo 1
$ cat 1
foo                             ; GOOD!
$ ln -s 1 2
$ cat 2
foo                             ; GOOD!
$ ln 2 3
$ cat 3
<some binary data instead of "foo">
$

I.e., hard links to soft links do not work.

--
Sam Steingold

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