[Info-vax] Hard links on VMS ODS5 disks

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2023-07-12 22:32, gah4 wrote:
> On Wednesday, July 12, 2023 at 6:34:40 AM UTC-7, Chris Townley wrote:
>> I am just about to install V9.2-1 and intrigued about hard links.
> 
> (snip)
> 
>> I have used soft links on *nix for many years, but only for linking to a
>> directory, which you cannot do with hard links
> 
> Symbolic links are often used for files on modern Unix-like systems.
> The cases that I know that are still hard links are programs that have
> different names.  For example, gzip, gunzip, zcat, and gzcat, are all the
> same file, but do different things based on argv[0].

Works the same if you use soft links.

Soft links are slightly costlier, but can do some things hard links cannot.

In Unix, you are not allowed to create arbitrary hard links to directories.
And hard links cannot cross between file systems.

In ODS, hard links to directories are not the same kind of problem as in 
Unix, and hard links works fine. Actually, might *maybe* be an issue in 
ODS-2 and newer, but with ODS-1 there is nothing problematic with hard 
links to directories.

However, the same limitation about crossing between file systems are 
also true on ODS.

   Johnny