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On Tuesday 23 Sep 2003 10:14 pm, Mike Tidball wrote: > Last night I was having problems with my save as box and was told to > > $ ln -s /windows/E ./data > > Neil said (after I called it a shortcut) > "It's much more than a shortcut". > What else can you do with it,and what is it if it isn't a shortcut.A link? It's a link - a symbolic link. As everything in Linux is a file, it's very common to find links in special places like /dev and /etc/ - even if the target of the link is a device. So it's more a case of what the system can do with links that makes them more powerful than in Windows. Links are also treated specially according to which process is looking at them. e.g. Apache can be configured to ignore all symlinks, only follow a link if the owner of the link matches the owner of the apache process or simply to follow all links, no matter what. There are obvious security implications with that last one, OK it's unlikely that the apache process would have write access to anything critical (it'll be very badly configured if it did) but still, it's not nice having your private documents emblazoned all over your website. (Which - not at all BTW - is EXACTLY what IIS does. It's easy to find all kinds of Windows users who have exposed their private My Documents folder to the entire internet through IIS! - if you know what to search for, Google returned some 4,000 hits last time I tried it.) Other processes like mkisofs (used in CD backups among others) will ignore links depending on configuration. This makes links very powerful - you can install or copy files anywhere and make symlinks to where the rest of the system expects them to be, but those links are effectively invisible to certain processes and users and so, therefore, are the files installed there. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.codehelp.co.uk/ http://www.dclug.org.uk/ http://www.isbn.org.uk/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/isbnsearch/ http://www.biglumber.com/x/web?qs=0x8801094A28BCB3E3
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