Hi All,
I tried creating a soft link with the file itself. It got created successfully.
bash-3.2$ ls -l a
lrwxrwxrwx 1 ebrigup other 1 Oct 5 19:14 a -> a
bash-3.2$
Can anyone explain what is the possible use of it. I dont see any except practically wasting an inode and server space.
Your positive comments will be highly appreciated.
Thanks
Brijesh
If you have a file/directory that will be needed at many different places and don't want to copy it <n> times everywhere in your filesystems, you simply use a soft link to reference to the original file.
Depending which type of filesystem you use and if it is not for thousands or hundred of thousands of files/directories, I would rather not speak of a waste of i-nodes.
We save disk space with them and enhance the administrative complexity a lot.
I am thankful we have this feature when needed.
A soft link allows you to put nearly any text into it, not necessarily paths and files. So why take the extra effort to check and disallow a self reference? You'll hit a brick wall anyhow sooner or later:
a: Too many levels of symbolic links