From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: arisawa <karisawa@gmail.com>
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Message-Id: <930069E7-B8D0-4829-A9EE-6611DCAF26A9@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 18 Apr 2017 10:29:25 +0900
To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net>
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Subject: [9fans] p9p: symlink
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Hello,

Symlink is one of ugly things in unix.
For example, my mac shows:

-bash$ ls -l /usr/bin/vi
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  3 11 18  2014 /usr/bin/vi -> vim
-bash$

This expression is something like a thorn.
Irregular fields makes things difficult.
The entity of /usr/bin/vi is /usr/bin/vim, which is

-bash$ ls -l /usr/bin/vim
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  1530240  6 24  2016 /usr/bin/vim
-bash$

I guess Russ hated the irregularity.
In plan9port we have

-bash$ 9 ls -l /usr/bin/vi
-Lrwxr-xr-x M 0 root wheel 3 Jun 24  2016 /usr/bin/vi
-bash$

but I wander why this isn't

-bash$ 9 ls -l /usr/bin/vi
-Lrwxr-xr-x M 0 root wheel 1530240 Jun 24  2016 /usr/bin/vi
-bash$

This comes from $P9P/src/lib9/_p9dir.c

		if(S_ISLNK(lst->st_mode)){	/* yes, lst not st */
			d->mode |= DMSYMLINK;
			d->length = lst->st_size;		<----- why Russ put this code?
		}

Any merit?

Kenji Arisawa

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P.S. This mail is resent because the mail wasn't received by 9fans.