From: Rossz Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp Subject: ln -s Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2000 20:50:29 GMT Organization: Deja.com - Before you buy. Lines: 23 Message-ID: <8dl66e$dkk$1@nnrp1.deja.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 208.239.86.120 X-Article-Creation-Date: Wed Apr 19 20:50:29 2000 GMT X-Http-User-Agent: Mozilla/4.5 [en] (Win95; U) X-Http-Proxy: 1.0 x43.deja.com:80 (Squid/1.1.22) for client 208.239.86.120 X-MyDeja-Info: XMYDJUIDrossz To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com In my opinion, DJGPP should stop trying to emulate symbolic links. Currently, ln creates a stub program that calls the originally named file. This works great if it was an EXE, however, all too often the file being linked is not an executable. For example, if I attempt this: ln -s stuff.h another.h I get a 2k file called another.h.exe. Not at all what is expected. I've run across a number of scripts that attempt to assertain if symbolic links work, one example did something like this: ln -s stuff.h another.h || cp stuff.h another.h This fails because ln's return code is 0. ln should be modified to ALWAYS return a nonzero code when a symbolic link is attempted. This would fix a large number of script portability problems. I suppose it could check the extension of the file and allow its bastardized symbolic link for EXEs but fail on others. Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/ Before you buy.