[Courses] [FS] Filesystem Course lesson 2

Dan Richter daniel.richter at wimba.com
Wed Jul 16 17:02:32 EST 2003


>So really it is not symbolic links that are relative, but rather the utility
>that creates them that behaves in a strange way.

Symbolic links are a part of the operating system, which is why it's 
impossible to port "ln" to Windows.   :-)

"ln" is a very simple utility that uses this built-in feature of the 
operating system. So I think it's more correct to say that the operating 
system interprets the link in an unintuitive way. Of course, it wouldn't be 
too hard to make "ln" automatically make the link absolute and/or issue a 
warning if the target file doesn't exist, so I guess you could put it 
either way.

--



More information about the Courses mailing list