Hard links to directories: why not?

[Henry Spencer]

In article <18461 at rpp386.cactus.org> jfh at rpp386.cactus.org (John F. Haugh II) writes:
>Aren't there better things to worry about?  My favorite is why
>doesn't the ln command require the use of a -f flag to blast a
>target file?

On sane Unix systems, ln fails if the target file exists already.  On
AT&T System V UNIX(R) Operating Systems, it silently goes ahead.  Some
faceless imbecile in the hordes of System V UNIX(R) Operating System
developers thought it would be cute if ln, mv, and cp all worked the
same way.
-- 
NFS:  all the nice semantics of MSDOS, | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
and its performance and security too.  |  henry at zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry