[ILUG] How to copy some files

[kevin lyda]

On Sat, Jul 20, 2002 at 11:11:11AM +0100, Aidan Kehoe wrote:
> 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

actaully i think soft links were invented because you can't hard link
directories.  apparently some systems limited soft links to the same
device but gave up after a while.  sadly, i can't find a link that
supports that...

> 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

soft-links are like one way hyperlinks (ala the www).  the target does
not inform those that target it when it moves or gets deleted.

and in fairness to berkeley, their socket api is very portably across
network protocols.  i've seen appletalk code written with the socket api.
and ipv6 code is written with the socket api.  the few things that
return static buffers or are not protocol independant are truly annoying,
but they did get a lot of that right.

kevin

-- 
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