UH2@psuvm.psu.edu (Lee Sailer) (05/05/90)
In article <11280@cbmvax.commodore.com>, andy@cbmvax.commodore.com (Andy Finkel) says: > >Yes. we have both hard and soft links for your convenience. > >(including on the ramdisk, which is a fairly interesting concept > in itself) > > I know what links are. But, could someone explain the difference between hard and soft links? thanks...
koren@hpfelg.HP.COM (Steve Koren) (05/07/90)
> >So ah...are they "in there"? > Yes. we have both hard and soft links for your convenience. > andy Excellent! (And congrats to all you C= folks on the 3000 and 2.0; I haven't gotten my hands on either yet, but both sound very nice. May you sell bazillions of 'em!) Here's a question re: links. Will this cause problems for programs (such as hard-disk backup utilities) which do a recursive scan of the filesystem? Ie, will the normal directory scan methods follow either hard or soft links? - steve
UH2@psuvm.psu.edu (Lee Sailer) (05/08/90)
Thanks to everyone who responded to my question about the difference between hard and soft links. As one guy said, I got 50 replies, so I ran out of gas trying to thank every one. In summary: Think of a hard link as a pointer from a name to a file. In the current AmigaDos, a file can only have one name. In a system that allows multiple hard links, a file may have more than one name (or even be in a different directory, etc). A soft link also allows a file to have more than one name, but it accomplishes this by pointing to the files original, or hard name, rather than directly to the file itself. (yes, i know this is a rough description and probably riddled with half truth) One important difference is that if you delete a file with multiple hard links, the remaining hard links still function properly. That is, the file is not deleted til the last hard link is. If you delete a file with soft links, the soft links then point to a file which no longer exists. On the other hand, soft links can cross device boundaries. Gee. Isn't education great? lee