Quoting Ronan Waide <waider at waider.ie>:
> Sure, but soft links would do the same. To be honest, I'm trying to
> think of a useful use of hard links right now, and I'm a little
> stumped. There's gotta be some benefit that I'm missing that's
> immediately obvious to everyone.
No there doesn't :-) . The Bell labs Unix people implemented hard
links, whereas Bill Joy and co. at Berkeley implemented soft links,
five years later, mainly to get around not being able to do
cross-device hard linking, as I understand it. Soft links are fairly
classic Berkeley hackery (cf. gethostbyname, h_errno, and the
resultant problems implementing mt-safe interfaces); they do what they
were intended for, but break fairly easily, in this case when the
target file was deleted. For a better design for similar ideas, see
the MacOS.
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