On Wed, Aug 08, 2001 at 10:56:56AM -0500, Bill Layer wrote:
> Ok, I have once again come across a document that gives a conflicting
> definition of 'dereferencing' a symlink... I need someone to clear this
> up, or a consensus would be fine too...
> 
> In my definition, when a symlink is 'dereferenced' it means that the
> symlink is treated as a symlink file, and not the file or directory to
> which it points. Like in the case of the cp -d option, when it encounters
> a symlink, it makes a copy of the symlink itself, not the file to which
> the symlink points.
> 
> To further confuse us, here is a clip from the manual for Gnut (an
> excellent console Gnutella client for Lin & Win): 
> 
> follow_symlinks - Boolean, defaults to 1. If set, symlinks will be
> dereferenced (followed) while scanning the files in the search paths.
> 
> Isn't 'follow' the exact opposite of the standard definition of
> 'dereferenced'? Am I wrong here?

I do not know specifically about"dereferencing symbolic links", but I assume 
it's close in meaning to "dereferencing pointers" in C/C++...

Dereferencing a pointer means accessing the object pointed to -> so to me
"dereferencing a symbolic link" means accessing the object linked to.

But I might be wrong...
florin

-- 

"If it's not broken, is because you are not fixing it enough."

41A9 2BDE 8E11 F1C5 87A6  03EE 34B3 E075 3B90 DFE4