The trouble with symbolic links

I *love* symlinks as they are, and I use them constantly, but the author makes some good points, especially with the race condition. This should all be fixable with new system calls/libc functions. Please don't mess with symlinks in general.

I personally don't *want* most userspace programs to be able to tell if something is a link. I've much more often had issues with a program that saw a symlink and refused to dereference it, than I ever have with a program that used them implicitly.

Note to other userspace developers: Please use stat() instead of lstat() whenever possible. You don't know if there's a good reason it's a symlink, for example, a .config folder could be pointing into an sshfs network drive so my settings are synced between machines. I put symlinks in weird places if I think they're useful, and the only times it hurts me are when some application is using lstat() and/or looking for symlinks some other way.