Re: cd tracking symbolic links

[Scott Schwartz <schwartz@galapagos.cse.psu.edu>]

| In the Unix paradigm, I guess this is what you're talking
| about.  I haven't use VMS in a while (and I'm not familiar with
| QNX or Sprite) would you provide an example of using prefix
| tables?  (I know, this is off the original subject).

This is pretty vague, because I haven't slept much today, but the idea
I was proposing is that if mutiple paths can lead to a directory, then
a processes idea of the path it took to get to the current directory is
more important than "." or "..".  So the kernel should store cwd as the
path build up by chdir(), not the [ivrg]node of the directory.  Then,
in the kernel, chdir("..") would be defined to be the same as clipping
off the tail of the current path, not following hard links in the
filesystem.

The mount point thing is suggestive because in unix, filesystems are
mounted on inodes, but another way to do it is to store a table of
mappings from pathnames to filesystems, and look for prefixes in that
table to decide which filesystem some path operation is aimed at.  So
who needs inodes or "." and ".." as actual directory entries.