Empty symlinks and full POSIX compliance

Years ago we run a software which was configured with a lot of symlinks, and a few plain files.

It worked like that:

/etc/foo/mail/to -> foo@example.com
/etc/foo/mail/subject-prefix ->

The benefit is: You don't need a config file parser, you can access the config simply by readlink("/etc/foo/mail/subject-prefix").

With an empty symlink you have another value you can use. Think of NULL vs "" in SQL.

file not found -> NULL
symlink to "" -> ""
symlink to "x" -> "x"

The semantic for subject-prefix was: if the symlink is not there, there was a default for subject-prefix. If you want no prefix, just set the symlink to "".