Which is probably why Unix tends to disallow hardlinks to directories.
They’re not physically impossible; on Mac, Time Machine even creates them (there’s some kind of special thing it has to do to be allowed to do that, I think). The system design people just went “yeah, that’s a bad idea”.
Which is slightly impressive coming from the people who decided newlines in filenames were perfectly fine, on a system where it’s very common practice to sling data around as a list of lines.
(I like the fact that literally every other character is allowed. Including spaces. Dealing with spaces isn’t too terrible! It’d just be way easier to deal with things in a guaranteed correct fashion if newlines in filenames weren’t allowed.)
Which is probably why Unix tends to disallow hardlinks to directories.
They’re not physically impossible; on Mac, Time Machine even creates them (there’s some kind of special thing it has to do to be allowed to do that, I think). The system design people just went “yeah, that’s a bad idea”.
Which is slightly impressive coming from the people who decided newlines in filenames were perfectly fine, on a system where it’s very common practice to sling data around as a list of lines.
(I like the fact that literally every other character is allowed. Including spaces. Dealing with spaces isn’t too terrible! It’d just be way easier to deal with things in a guaranteed correct fashion if newlines in filenames weren’t allowed.)
– Frost