Hard links broken?

[Randall R Schulz]

Nicolas,

You've got something else going on. I, too, am running Cygwin 1.3.17 
('cause of my other problems with 1.3.18) and hard links work fine for me.

I assume you are using an NTFS file system, right? FAT file systems don't 
support hard links.

I have noticed that Cygwin's link code falls back to copying for more 
reasons than just lack of support for hard links in the underlying file 
system. If I knew more about what variety of failures in attempting to 
create a hard link will cause Cygwin to fall back to copying the file, I'd 
tell you, but I just remember seeing other things do it.

What are the ownership and permissions of the directory in which the files 
involved reside? How do they relate to the user (id) making the attempt?

Randall Schulz

P.S. Nicolas, please subscribe to the list, at least for as long it takes 
to get this issue resolved.


At 20:29 2002-12-27, Nicolas Williams wrote:

>So, I upgraded to Cygwin 1.3.17-1 this weekend and mutt started behaving
>oddly (I upgraded mutt as well).  My laptop runs Windows XP (SP1).
>
>The behaviour is this: it fails to lock the mail spools and thinks some
>other process has the spools locked and prompts me as to whether to
>remove the lock files after timing out.
>
>Besides being very obnoxious this behaviour is very obnoxious.
>
>So I straced mutt and the problem appears to be that the call to link()
>a file to the lock file name fails, but it does actually copy the file.
>
>So, I did this:
>
>% touch foobar
>% ln foobar foobar.lock
>% ls -li foobar foobar.lock
>3893364076 -rw-r--r--    1 myuser   None            0 Dec 27 22:09 foobar
>3895124156 -rw-r--r--    1 myuser   None            0 Dec 27 22:09 foobar.lock
>%
>
>So hard links don't work now.
>
>Here's a snippet from the strace output:
>
>(first the spoolfile.<user>.<pid> is created)
>..
>   118 2609558 [main] mutt 4024 normalize_posix_path: src myuser.lock
>   111 2609669 [main] mutt 4024 cwdstuff::get: (/var/spool/mail) = 
> cwdstuff::get (0x22DB38, 260, 1, 0
>), errno 2
>   500 2610169 [main] mutt 4024 symlink_info::check: not a symlink
>    77 2610246 [main] mutt 4024 symlink_info::check: 0 = symlink.check 
> (C:\cygwin\var\spool\mail\myuser
>.lock, 0x22D7F8) (0xA)
>   115 2610361 [main] mutt 4024 link: file 
> 'C:\cygwin\var\spool\mail\myuser.lock' exists?
>    63 2610424 [main] mutt 4024 link: -1 = link (myuser.MYUSER.4024, 
> myuser.lock)
>..
>
>But, before mutt gets to this point the lock file (myuser.lock) does not
>exist, and yet it exists from that point forward.
>
>Should I install and earlier Cygwin release?  How should I do that?
>
>Thanks,
>
>Nico
>PS: I'm not on the list.


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