On Fri, 14 Sep 2001 00:56:23 +0300, Vadim Vygonets wrote:
> Quoth Philip Hazel on Thu, Sep 13, 2001:
> > (And _real_ newbies don't even know
> > about soft links. For myself, I always alias "ls" to "ls -F" so I know
> > what kinds of thing I'm looking at. Perhaps this is what has moulded my
> > views.)
>
> Symlinks are better than hard links. A regular file is just a
> hard link. You must do 'ls -l' and pay attention to the number
> of hard links to see whether a file has more than one 'name'.
I think you guys both misunderstood what I was suggesting the use of
hardlinks for. I wasn't suggesting that a bunch of hardlinks be left
lying around. I was suggesting that they be used for the installation
of the desired binary, i.e.
cp .../sbin/exim .../sbin/exim.old.version
cp .../obj/exim .../sbin/exim.new.version
ln .../sbin/exim.new.version .../sbin/exim
rm .../sbin/exim.new.version
However, looking back at Philip's original mail, it seems that a goal is
to make it easy to see the version of the Exim binary simply by looking
at the filesystem.
This feels icky to me, since a filename can always be a lie, while exim
-bV can't.
Ciao,
Sheldon.
