Re: lynx-dev LYNX: meaning of "Bad partial reference; stripping leading dots"?

[Duncan Simpson]

> On Wed, 26 Jul 2000, pAb-032871 wrote:
> >On many FTP servers, you may notice two "directories" [I think
> 
> They _are_ directories.
> 
> >that's what they are] in every listing, named "." and ".."  Entering
> >"." puts you in the current directory [possibly a refreshed listing?],
> >and ".." moves you up one directory.  The system might put these
> >here automatically for some reason, I don't know much about it.
> 
> They are simply directory entries. ".." refers up one, and "." is the
> current directory..  (Hmm, I was thinking that ".." may be a soft link 
> to the upper directory, but I guess not..    I was thinking it was then
> maybe a hard link...
> 

. and .. *are* hard links, modulo the magic that happens at device boundaries 
on unicies.  A direct effetc of this is that you can compute hte number of 
subdriectoires of a directory as <reference count>-2  (in the rout diretcory . 
and .. are the same directory). As with all hard links they repesent a device 
and inode combination. There is no preference for any of the various names 
that refer to a given device and inode combination. Symbolic links are 
genuinely different.

-- 
Duncan (-:
"software industry, the: unique industry where selling substandard goods is
legal and you can charge extra for fixing the problems."



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