Should find traverse symbolic links?

[Sean Eric Fagan]

In article <125284 at uunet.UU.NET> rbj at uunet.UU.NET (Root Boy Jim) writes:
>In article <1991Mar9.213928.10943 at NCoast.ORG> allbery at ncoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR) writes:
>>Unfortunately, I don't have
>>the faintest idea what to replace them with.
>Nor do I.

Fine time to talk about Embos, the only OS I've preferred to use over UNIX
(note that that does not mean *program* in; it was written in Pascal, and
things were ugly [imho] because of that).

Embos had a neat filesystem.  Very nice ACL's, with lots of nice features.
They never struck me as being "tacked on," which many systems do.  Anyway,
line some unix systems, Embos had two kinds of links.  I think they were
"aliases" and "equates," although I'm not sure of the name.  Anyway:

One type of "link" was the equivalent of a Unix hard-link.  As files could
cross mount-points, as could links, there was no need for a symbolic link
(as most people use them in bsd unices).

The other type was, well, weird.  It was inheiritable.  That is, like
environment variables, all of your children saw this "link."  For example,
you could do the equivalent of

	% cd
	% csh
	% set termcap = /etc/termcap
	% ls -l termcap
	-rw-rw-r--   1 root     sys       120933 Jun 12 1990 termcap
	% cd /tmp
	% ls -l ~/termcap
	-rw-rw-r--   1 root     sys       120933 Jun 12 1990 ~/termcap
	% exit
	% ls -l termcap
	termcap not found

One of the uses for this was, if a program wanted to write to a logfile, you
could arrange for that logfile to actually be something completely
different.  (I think VMS has something like this, doesn't it?)

Note that one of the bits a program had associated with it (such as
'executable' and 'sticky-text') was 'overide alias' or somesuch:  the
program would get the actual filesystem, not the environment-links.

There have been times when I would have liked this feature in unix...

-- 
Sean Eric Fagan  | "I made the universe, but please don't blame me for it;
sef at kithrup.COM  |  I had a bellyache at the time."
-----------------+           -- The Turtle (Stephen King, _It_)
Any opinions expressed are my own, and generally unpopular with others.