symlink handling

[Adam Olsen <adamolsen@technologist.com>]

I came up with this idea as a way of handling symlinked dirs, which is
a major problem on hurd, and I've run into it several times on linux
too.  Basically when someone does something like dpkg -S
/usr/bin/X11/xterm, you strip the path and search for a file with that
name.  Then stat both the original file given, and the files in the
db, and compare them to see if any are identical (via inodes?).

To do this manually you could do dpkg -S xterm | grep '/xterm$'
(probably a better way), then compare each of the 8 files returned.

Comments?  Could this be done?  Or am I missing something completely?


p.s. I'm not on the list, so be sure to keep me on the CCs :)

-- 
Adam Olsen, aka Rhamphoryncus