History lessons

[Curry]

In article <92 at cithep.UucP> tim at cithep.UucP (Tim Smith ) writes:
>> I have it from a reliable source (Ritchie) that in the original Unix file
>> system, the directory structure was an arbitrary graph. It was changed
>> to a tree because of the hair involved in consistency checking. As late
>> as v6, ln command allowed root to link directories, and across file
>> systems. This may have been a Purdue hack, though.
>
>Root can still link directories, as far as the kernel is concerned.  As for
>linking across file systems, this must be a Purdue hack, since it is not
>possible on ordinary v6,v7,TS 1.?, SIII, and SV for very fundamental reasons.
>How did they change the file system to allow this?


I'm not sure who started this rumor, but it's incorrect.  Purdue never
hacked in stuff to allow you to link across file systems.  So far as I
know, we never did much else to the file system either, with the small
exception of gracefully handling what happens when the file system runs
out of space.

Of course Purdue did hack in lots of other stuff, but that's a different
story all together.

--Dave Curry