Re: [RFC] readlink()-related oddities

From	David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Newsgroups	linux.kernel
Subject	Re: [RFC] readlink()-related oddities
Date	2015-11-20 11:10 +0100
Message-ID	<qwQNI-5O7-15@gated-at.bofh.it> (permalink)
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Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk> wrote:

> How would those tools know that this particular pathname _is_ a magical
> symlink?  Sure, if you see a symlink with body that starts with % or #,
> you could figure out that it's not a regular one and go parse the body,
> but for stat(2) it looks like a directory.  Do those tools call readlink()
> on every directory they spot on AFS volume?  David?

It has to be a directory so that you can mount on it.  If you look in /afs on
an OpenAFS client filesystem it appears as a symlink to somewhere under /afs/
because they can't do the in-kernel mounting (it's GPL-only on Linux).

David
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Thread

[RFC] readlink()-related oddities Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk> - 2015-11-20 00:30 +0100
  Re: [RFC] readlink()-related oddities Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> - 2015-11-20 03:20 +0100
    Re: [RFC] readlink()-related oddities Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk> - 2015-11-20 04:00 +0100
      Re: [RFC] readlink()-related oddities Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> - 2015-11-20 04:10 +0100
        Re: [RFC] readlink()-related oddities Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> - 2015-11-20 04:20 +0100
          Re: [RFC] readlink()-related oddities Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk> - 2015-11-20 04:30 +0100
      Re: [RFC] readlink()-related oddities David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> - 2015-11-20 11:10 +0100
  Re: [RFC] readlink()-related oddities David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> - 2015-11-20 11:00 +0100
    Re: [RFC] readlink()-related oddities Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk> - 2015-11-20 17:10 +0100
      Re: [RFC] readlink()-related oddities David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com> - 2015-11-20 17:30 +0100
    Re: [RFC] readlink()-related oddities Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk> - 2015-11-20 23:40 +0100

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