Reporting broken symlinks to clients

Ira Cooper ira at samba.org
Fri Jun 14 16:29:08 MDT 2013


On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 6:27 PM, Christof Schmitt <
christof.schmitt at us.ibm.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 12:37:24PM -0700, Jeremy Allison wrote:
> > > This could be useful in environments where the same directory is
> > > accessible to Windows clients and to Linux/Unix systems. When a
> > > broken symlink is created, the Windows clients would at least be able
> > > to see that there is a file.
> > >
> > > Comments?
> >
> > What is the goal of presenting the broken links to the Windows clients ?
> >
> > I'm trying to understand the use case here.
>
> I will try to get some more details. The main point would be that the
> client sees that a file exists, even if it is not accessible. If i
> remember correctly, this is from an application that accesses the same
> share through cifs and nfs, the links are only valid on the nfs client
> systems, and the existence of the symbolic link is used to determine
> the behaviour of the application.



One of the simpler use cases is removal of a directory recursively.  If
there's a symlink in the directory the windows client can't find.  It can't
remove it, and then it can't remove the directory.

-Ira


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