Re: directory hardlinks

[Jukka Iso-Heiniemi <jd ts ray fi>]

On Mon, 1 Oct 2001, Ross A Knepper wrote:

> On Mon, 1 Oct 2001, Iso-H wrote:
> >  This is not alpha spesific, but still... has anybody
> >  know how to get hardlinks to work with directories (or what
> >  is proper mail list to ask for); ... and yes, I really need
> >  hardlinks for directories.
> 
> you can't.  true, you could hack the code to make it work.  but you really
> shouldnt.  hard links for directories are semantically ambiguous.  for
> instance, if you "cd ..", which directory do you end up in?  

  Hmm, that's very true. 

  Actually my problem was/is to create system where is possible
  to change content (==subdirs) of NFS export directory very
  quickly without moving data around. I studied to possibility
  to mount loopback-devices (each device has one "target"
   directory) locally in file server to change content of 
  NFS export directory, but mount point limit is only 255 and
  it is definitely too low; so if I can raise that limit it
  could solve the problem. But is it possible to change that
  or is there somewhere 8-bit integer which limits that
  value to be absolute maximum ?

> there's a good reason that unix has never had hard links to
> directories...
> 
>  -ross
> 

---

Iso-H