Re: [boost] Filesystem: remove_all should not follow symlinks

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-11-18 12:35:12

At 12:35 AM 11/15/2003, Walter Landry wrote:
 >
 >I found that remove_all wants to follow symlinks when recursing.  This
 >causes it to fail if the target of the link does not exist.  It also
 >seems a little dangerous.

Thanks, Walter!

I think you're right. Like remove(), remove_all() should not follow 
symbolic links when recursing.

 >  I have attached a patch to fix that.

The patch uses is_link(), and its specs need to be nailed down.

There are two questions that need to be answered:

[Help needed from POSIX programmers on the following.]

* Does S_ISLNK() return true only for symbolic links, and never for regular 
reference-counted links? If so, that means is_link() never returns true 
except for symbolic links, so I'd rather call it is_symbolic_link().

[Help needed from Win32 programmers on the following.]

* Can is_symbolic_link() just return false on Windows?

Windows does have some similar concepts - shortcuts and journals - but the 
behavior seems different from a POSIX-style symbolic link. Particularly, 
shortcuts by default seem to exhibit shallow rather than deep behavior, and 
seem more an application (shell) artifact rather than a kernel feature. But 
maybe I don't understand them - any pointers to an underlying API would be 
appreciated. And I certainly don't understand journal points. Windows does 
have reference counted hard links, very similar to POSIX links, but that 
isn't the issue here.

Comments needed!

--Beman