[Techtalk] symlinks

Cynthia Kiser cnk at ugcs.caltech.edu
Thu Aug 2 22:26:36 UTC 2007


Quoting Maria McKinley <maria at shadlen.org>:
> Does anyone know if there is a way of finding if/where there are 
> symlinks in a directory (other than going through and looking at ls -l 
> in every subdirectory? 

find . -type l -print


> I am thinking of upgrading netatalk, but I guess symlinks don't work
> with the new netatalk, so I want to check to see how much we will be
> affected.
> 
> Also, if anyone know what this really means:
> 
> Don't use unix symlinks. Just don't. With a symlink a file/directory 
> "exists" twice, something AFP doesn't allow. There's currently no way 
> this can be resolved, as we either end up with two file/dirs having the 
> same id, or a file having two parents. If you still insist on using 
> them, be aware you're heavily  violating the specs. You have been warned...
> 
> So, will the symlinks just be ignored, or will it cause problems with 
> the symlinks when used on the linux machine? It seems a weird, 
> threatening paragraph, and I'm not sure there is really much affect, 
> other than it just doesn't work when the volume is mounted.

I don't know what the failure mode would be. From my 30 seconds of
google-acquired knowledge about netatalk, I would say that old Mac's
didn't have symlinks, so the appletalk protocol doesn't specify how
they would be treated. What are you using netatalk to do and that
might help folks guess what might be problematic.

-- 
Cynthia N. Kiser


More information about the Techtalk mailing list