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

From: Walter Landry (wlandry_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-11-25 19:19:23

Beman Dawes <bdawes_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> Explicit dereferencing would be awfully cumbersome. People using O/S's 
> which natively support symbolic links would likely view it as a giant step 
> backward for them. Plus there would be interoperability problems - programs 
> using Boost.Filesystem wouldn't work the way other programs worked.

One solution is to have an extra argument which indicates whether to
resolve symlinks, and have the default be yes.  Something like

  bool exists(const path &ph, bool resolve_symlinks=true)

Then remove_all would use exists(ph,false).  You could provide this
for all of the functions that use ::stat internally.  That looks like
exists, is_directory, _is_empty, and copy_file.  I don't think that
would be too cumbersome.

Regards,
Walter Landry
wlandry_at_[hidden]