On Wed, Aug 08, 2001 at 10:56:56AM -0500, Bill Layer wrote: > Ok, I have once again come across a document that gives a conflicting > definition of 'dereferencing' a symlink... I need someone to clear this > up, or a consensus would be fine too... > > In my definition, when a symlink is 'dereferenced' it means that the > symlink is treated as a symlink file, and not the file or directory to > which it points. Like in the case of the cp -d option, when it encounters > a symlink, it makes a copy of the symlink itself, not the file to which > the symlink points. > > To further confuse us, here is a clip from the manual for Gnut (an > excellent console Gnutella client for Lin & Win): > > follow_symlinks - Boolean, defaults to 1. If set, symlinks will be > dereferenced (followed) while scanning the files in the search paths. > > Isn't 'follow' the exact opposite of the standard definition of > 'dereferenced'? Am I wrong here? I do not know specifically about"dereferencing symbolic links", but I assume it's close in meaning to "dereferencing pointers" in C/C++... Dereferencing a pointer means accessing the object pointed to -> so to me "dereferencing a symbolic link" means accessing the object linked to. But I might be wrong... florin -- "If it's not broken, is because you are not fixing it enough." 41A9 2BDE 8E11 F1C5 87A6 03EE 34B3 E075 3B90 DFE4