Re: FS: hardlinks on directories

From: Hans Reiser
Date: Sun Aug 24 2003 - 12:41:33 EST


Helge Hafting wrote:

On Tue, Aug 05, 2003 at 03:03:51PM +0200, Stephan von Krawczynski wrote:


On Tue, 05 Aug 2003 14:51:46 +0200
Helge Hafting <helgehaf@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:



Even more fun is when you have a directory loop like this:

mkdir A
cd A
mkdir B
cd B
make hard link C back to A

cd ../..
rmdir A

You now removed A from your home directory, but the
directory itself did not disappear because it had
another hard link from C in B.


How about a truly simple idea:

rmdir A says "directory in use" and is rejected



Then anybody can prevent you from removing your obsolete directories
by creating links to them. Existing hard link don't have
such problems.


So, he needs links that count as references, links that don't count as references but disappear if the object disappears (without dangling like symlinks), and unlinkall(), which removes an object and all of its links. He needs for the first reference to a directory to be removable only by removing all links to the object, or designating another link to be the "first" reference.

Sounds clean to me. This is not to say that I am funded to write it.;-) I'd look at a patch though.....;-)

I need to write up a taxonomy of links..... after reiser4 ships.....

--
Hans


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