hard links to directories

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Article #13141

#13141

From: Eric Hanchrow
Date: Fri, 01 Dec 1989 19:55

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SunOS 4.0.3, Sun4/260

A while ago, out of curiosity, I made a hard link to one of my
directories.  After I got bored with it, I decided to get rid of one of
the links... and couldn't.  I tried `\rm -f', `unlink', and `rmdir'.
Curiously, `rmdir' reported that the directory was not empty, even though
it was.  Is it possible that `rmdir' looks at the number of links to a
directory, and if that number is > 2, it assumes that the directory is not
empty?

Anyhow, I never could get rid of either of the links, so I swept them
under the rug by putting them in /tmp, giving them funny names, changing
their owners to `nobody', and changing their permissions to 0.

Any brilliant commentary explaining this odd behavior would be
appreciated.

|Eric Hanchrow          yamada-sun!eric@nosun.west.sun.com              |
|Phase III Logic, Inc.  ...!{tektronix, sun}!nosun!yamada-sun!eric      |

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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rice!sun-spots-request
From: yamada-sun!eric@nosun.west.sun.com (Eric Hanchrow)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.sun
Subject: hard links to directories
Keywords: SunOS
Message-ID: <3751@brazos.Rice.edu>
Date: 1 Dec 89 19:55:41 GMT
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