The trouble with symbolic links

Posted Jul 8, 2022 2:21 UTC (Fri) by felixfix (subscriber, #242)
Parent article: The trouble with symbolic links

"Symlinks were created, Allison theorized, because hard links are restricted to linking within the same filesystem"

Hard links are also restricted to regular files, or at least to not being a directory. I checked just now, and almost all my symlinks are to directories.

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The trouble with symbolic links

Posted Jul 8, 2022 8:36 UTC (Fri) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes a lot of those exist because people can’t agree on the correct file layout, app writers adhere to different theories, so the only way to make a bunch of unix apps behave more or less the same (becoming manageable) is to fool them via symlinks.

Windows uses magic registry entries for the same need, it works about as ugly.

The trouble with symbolic links

Posted Jul 8, 2022 10:28 UTC (Fri) by grawity (subscriber, #80596) [Link]

Even Windows (after the Vista migration to space-less directories) now ships with symlinks like ~\Application Data to ~\AppData\Roaming, because programs can't be bothered to check environment and just hardcode paths...

The trouble with symbolic links

Posted Jul 22, 2022 7:40 UTC (Fri) by callegar (guest, #16148) [Link]

Hard links are also way more "symmetric" and the inherent "asymmetry" in symbolic links has value and usage.