Linking Files: Hard Link vs. Soft Link?

[Derek Broughton]

Smoot Carl-Mitchell wrote:

> On Wed, 2009-04-15 at 12:35 -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:
> 
>> Fascinating discussion. I have practically never used hard links simply
>> because symlinks work across filesystems, and KDE only does symlinks, so
>> I'm really not that familiar with hard links, but I don't understand that
>> particular point.  If, for instance, you have your music collection set
>> up with hierarchies for artist and genre, then the "leaf" of both is
>> probably
>> an "album", which is probably a directory.  There's no intrinsic reason
>> why a directory should be treated differently from a file afaict.
> 
> There is no technical reason a directory cannot be hardlinked.  However,
> if this was allowed in general then the filesystem structure would no
> longer be a tree, but could be any directed graph with loops. Programs
> like tar or cpio which recursively walk the tree would be a lot more
> complicated. 

Right - I, of course, began to see this immediately _after_ my post :-)
-- 
derek