Are links as useful as they could be?

[System Mangler]

In article <8313 at sun.uucp>, guy at sun.UUCP writes:
> > why didn't they [Berkeley] just make symbolic links a variant
> > type of directory entry, containing a string instead of an
> > inode number?
>
> Because that would have required non-trivial changes to programs that read
> directory entries,

Many directory-reading programs (ls, tar, find) had to gain explicit
knowledge of symbolic links anyway, the changes were even user-visible.

Don Speck   speck at vlsi.caltech.edu  {seismo,rutgers}!cit-vax!speck