Re: Hard links to directories

[Michael Spang <mike@midgard.no-ip.org>]

Hubert Chan wrote:

> On Sun, 4 Sep 2005 15:40:58 +0100 (BST), Max <max@mcs.st-and.ac.uk> said:
>
>  
>
> > Dear All, Is there a way of switching on permission to have hard links
> > to directories?
> >    
> >
> > Is there a rationale for disallowing this?
> >    
>
> The Linux kernel VFS does not allow directory hard links for technical
> reasons.  (i.e. they don't know how to implement it without potentially
> breaking things or killing performance.)
>  
If I remember correctly, this *used* to be possible. A couple of major 
kernel versions ago I recall being able to create hard links to 
directories on my ext2 filesystem. Doing so did issue a warning, but 
other than that I saw no problems. It seems they realized it is unwise 
to allow this and disabled it altogether; It may have never worked 
flawlessly to begin with. Does anybody know exactly when this happened 
and for what reason? I can see why its not necessary or efficient to 
implement properly, but I am curious about the details of this change.

Thanks,
Michael Spang