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Re: Symlink, chrdev, blkdev translators


From: Patrick Strasser
Subject: Re: Symlink, chrdev, blkdev translators
Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 21:12:44 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; de-DE; rv:1.0rc2) Gecko/20020512 Netscape/7.0b1

Marcus Brinkmann schrieb:
On Mon, Aug 19, 2002 at 02:23:47PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

It seems to me that there exist some kind of "fake" or "magic" translators
which show up "automatically".


Oh yes, there are!  You found another underdocumented exciting Hurd feature ;)
>
[...]
>
tar btw should notice /hurd/symlink translators and the others and treat
them as special cases, so it doesn't store them as translators but as real
symlinks.  This is so that you can pack a symbolic link into a tar file and
extract it on another Unix system (so it is desirable for cross platform
compatibility).  Currently tar doesn't support translators at all, so it
won't even notice.

The full list of such special translators is in <hurd/paths.h>:
/* Standard translators for special node types.
   These pathnames are used by the C library.
   UFS and perhaps other filesystems short-circuit these translators.  */
#define _HURD_SYMLINK   _HURD "symlink" /* S_IFLNK */
#define _HURD_CHRDEV    _HURD "chrdev" /* S_IFCHR */
#define _HURD_BLKDEV    _HURD "blkdev" /* S_IFBLK */
#define _HURD_FIFO      _HURD "fifo" /* S_IFIFO */
#define _HURD_IFSOCK    _HURD "ifsock" /* S_IFSOCK */


What about translating compressed/tar'ed files this way?

I always thought this to be a very cool automagical hurdish thing I then found working in WinXP. I don't like WinXP, but this thingy really works, and I like the functionality. What about unpacking {t{ar{,.gz,.bz2},gz},gz,bz2} files when accessed as directories, but as usual when accessed as files? These files would be listed as files. This would not break compatibility too much. I don't know if programs exist that would come into conflict with themselves with such constructs.

Would be a really cool feature... I have not read any code in this area, so I'm in the dark if this is the right place in the Hurd to hook this in.

I'll go read some code. Does anyone know a working GOBAL or LXR for a reasonably up to date CVS-snapshot?

Regards, Patrick
--
Engineers motto: cheap, good, fast: choose any two
Patrick Strasser <pstrasser at sbox dot tugraz dot at>
Student of Telematik, Techn. University Graz, Austria





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