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Date:      Sun, 22 Jul 2001 12:47:07 -0700
From:      Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>
To:        Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
Cc:        Joshua Goodall <joshua@roughtrade.net>, freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: flags on symlinks
Message-ID:  <3B5B2DBB.16B607E2@mindspring.com>
References:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0107222210480.25554-100000@besplex.bde.org>

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Bruce Evans wrote:
> > Is there a particular reason why there's no capability for setting flags
> > on symlinks? the chflags syscall uses namei with FOLLOW, and changing this
> > to NOFOLLOW allows chflags(2) to Do What I Want (i.e. SF_IMMUTABLE on a
> > VLNK)


Flags are associated with inodes, and symlinks do not have
inodes in the common case, as they exist solely in the
directory entry, unless they are too long.


> > is there a filesystem train crash awaiting me for doing this, or am I in
> > the clear? I realise it changes the semantics of chflags(1) so an
> > alternative syscall or a follow/nofollow boolean addition to struct
> > chflags_args is better than this hack.
> 
> There should be a separate lchflags syscall for this.  Obtain it from
> NetBSD.  Several utilities need to be updated to handle flags on symlinks.
> I'm not sure if NetBSD has implemented this.

Pretty clearly, there should _NOT_ be a seperate system call;
the damn thing should just work.  Adding a seperate system call
means theaching everything that deals with flags about it (ls,
chflags, every FS supporing symlinks, etc.).

-- Terry

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