[Courses] [FS] Filesystem Course lesson 2

Dan Richter daniel.richter at wimba.com
Wed Jul 16 15:46:57 EST 2003


>I notice that you refer to direcotries with an ending slash
>eg web/  ../   ./
>Whereas I think of directories as files ("everything in Unix is a file"),
>hence the above directorys are
>  web   ..    .

In almost all cases[1] you can have a trailing slash or not; there's no 
difference. I think that "ls" can be configured (somehow) to list 
directories with or without a trailing slash. It's all about preference.

[1] As usual, there are messed-up exceptions. I've noticed that when I use 
"ls -ld" on symbolic links that point to directories, the result is 
slightly different depending on whether I include a trailing slash.

>ln interprets the pathname of the actual file/directory relative to
>the directory which is to contain the symbolic link.

Yes, that's sum total of the relativity of symbolic links.

--
    Many hacker groups, in anonymous interviews with Mi2g, have
    said that they prefer attacking Linux systems and very rarely
    target anything running Windows, simply because to do so is
    far too easy...
      - Jan Andresen, computer security expert at Mi2g
        (a computer security consulting firm)



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