Linux-kernel mailing list archive 1999-25,: Re: I discussed reading directories as files with jra, Stallman,

# Re: I discussed reading directories as files with jra, Stallman,

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@transmeta.com)
Sun, 20 Jun 1999 19:30:10 -0700 (PDT)

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On Sun, 20 Jun 1999, Alexander Viro wrote:
>
> Huh? You mean that the right case here being *not* the regular symlink?

No, the normal case being _nothing_. Neither symlink nor other wormhole.

> Up to you. But IMO you are mixing two seriously different objects
> together and the cost is pretty high.

Why?

They are NOT different.

They are only different because you _think_ they are different. Get over
your hangups with old implementations of symlinks, and you will notice
that it's _exactly_ the same issue as with any other "magic wormhole".

I agree about code duplication, but if that's your concern then you should
just create a "generic_file_symlink()", the same way we condense the
common code for "generic_file_read()" and "generic_file_write()". That has
nothing to do with whether it is recursive or not.

Linus

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