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Subject: Re: How to fix : Cannot extract through symlink
To: Manish Jain <bourne.identity@hotmail.com>,
 "freebsd-questions@freebsd.org" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
References: <VI1PR02MB12009190A3338F191796057EF60D0@VI1PR02MB1200.eurprd02.prod.outlook.com>
From: Arthur Chance <freebsd@qeng-ho.org>
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Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2017 15:42:22 +0000
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On 21/12/2017 14:37, Manish Jain wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Whenever I try to install any rpm under my Linuxulator (linux_base-c7), 
> I get the error: cannot extract through <sym>
> 
> <sym> can be bin / sbin / lib / lib64, which are symbolic links to 
> usr/<sym> (under the path /compat/linux/)
> 
> Each time I am faced with this problem, I have to delete <sym> and copy 
> the actual directory in its place. But this is far less than ideal.
> 
> 1) Is there some way I can avoid the above mess ?
> 2) If not, there was a time under Unix when hard-linking a directory was 
> possible. Is there some hack by which I could hard-link directories 
> under FreeBSD ?

Looking at the manual for link(2), hard linking directories is
explicitly forbidden by the kernel.

Many moons ago under SunOS I tried hard linking directories just to see
what happened. Believe me, it's not a place you want to be, especially
not if the link went up the file hierarchy.

-- 
An amusing coincidence: log2(58) = 5.858 (to 0.0003% accuracy).