[sclug] Copy drive problem
Ed Davies
sclug.xu.1106 at edavies.me.uk
Tue Mar 5 09:01:28 UTC 2013
On 2013-03-04 23:58, John Stumbles wrote:
> > That said, it is an odd flag to have.
>
> Presumably the coders thought the default 'follow' behaviour was the
> sensible default so added 'nofollow' to allow for those infinitely rare
> occasions where coders fail to second-guess users' actual requirements? ;-)
As far as I can see all this flag does is cause an error
message if the name passed on the if switch happens to be a
symlink. I'm having a hard time third-guessing when that
would be the user's actual requirement.
edavies at bill:~/temp$ mkdir t
edavies at bill:~/temp$ cd t
edavies at bill:~/temp/t$ echo abc > a
edavies at bill:~/temp/t$ echo bcd > b
edavies at bill:~/temp/t$ ln -s a s
edavies at bill:~/temp/t$ ls -Al
total 8
-rw-rw-r-- 1 edavies edavies 4 Mar 5 08:54 a
-rw-rw-r-- 1 edavies edavies 4 Mar 5 08:55 b
lrwxrwxrwx 1 edavies edavies 1 Mar 5 08:55 s -> a
edavies at bill:~/temp/t$ dd iflag=nofollow if=s of=a
dd: opening `s': Too many levels of symbolic links
edavies at bill:~/temp/t$
Any further thoughts?
Ed.
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