requested feature

[Steven French]

> rm -r" does not follow a soft link when issued from a UNIX environment,
however when a delete folder is issued from the [Windows] smbclient
> it will delete the targets on soft links

Although you may consider preventing following of symlinks completely on
the server(specify "follow symlinks = no" in smb.conf),  I am not aware of
something that would selectively apply this to only the delete operation.
Also see the relatively new smb.conf parameter for Samba 3 "widelinks"
which controls whether to follow symlinks to files outside the server
share.

Note that deltree is not an atomic protocol operation.   Windows clients (I
presume that you are interested in Windows clients here, not the Linux cifs
client) execute a series of steps to do tihs:
      FindFirst(directory name)
      QueryPathInfo
      Delete(file name)
      RemoveDirectory(directory name)
For this series of operations the actual order depends somewhat on the
Windows application or GUI doing the delete.

> If there is a "recursive deletion inhibit" flag somewhere
Not that I can think of, although you can of course prevent all deletes of
an object by setting the ACL on the object.

Steve French
Senior Software Engineer
Linux Technology Center - IBM Austin
phone: 512-838-2294
email: sfrench at-sign us dot ibm dot com