Re: [ANNOUNCEMENT]: Important change to symbolic link functionality

[Christopher Faylor <cgf at redhat dot com>]

On Thu, Feb 22, 2001 at 03:02:14PM +1300, Mark Hadfield wrote:
>OK, so I can avoid this by using Cygwin, right? Well no. Doing a "ls" on a
>directory with migrated files is OK, doing an "ls -l" takes several minutes,
>I think because ls tries to read data from every file to see if is a
>symlink. Command completion also seems to involve looking up symlinks, so is
>unusable.

No.  Cygwin only does symlink tests on files which have the system attribute
set.  This was hashed, rehashed and bitterly noted in a recent thread here.
It does open the file to see if it has a '#!', marking it executable if so.

Possibly setting CYGWIN=ntsec will avoid this overhead.  Mounting the directory
with the '-x' flag will certainly avoid it at the expense of having cygwin
think that every file in the directory is executable.

>If Cygwin were to do its symlink checks only on files with the .lnk
>extension, then these problems would go away.
>
>It has been on the back of my mind for a while that symlinks are supposed to
>have their system bit set. As far as I can tell, none of the files on the
>DMF area, as served by Samba, does have its system bit set. So "ls -l"
>shouldn't be looking inside any of the files to see if they're symlinks.
>Perhaps there's some other reason to look inside the file? Oh well, I guess
>that's one of life's little mysteries I'll never solve. But the new symlink
>functionality sounds like a good idea anyway.

You could solve this by either reading the code or paying attention to the
mailing list...

cgf

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