"Olson, Arthur David (NCI)" <olsona@dc37a.nci.nih.gov> wrote:
Checking the legislative history, I discovered that the item attached below is what got the symlink ball rolling. What I'm after is something that handles such real-world cases correctly; I'm willing to let non-real-world cases slide. ... The command "zic -l MET" should set the local time zone by linking the file "/usr/share/zoneinfo/MET" to "/etc/localtime". It uses a hard link for this purpose. On my system this fails, because the directories "/etc" and "/usr/share/zoneinfo" are located on different disk partitions on my system.
In this case, we have an absolute pathname for the pointed-to file, so there's no danger in making a symlink. So how about: try hard linking; if that fails with EXDEV, and if we have a full pathname for the pointed-to file, use a symlink. Otherwise give up. Do we generally have absolute paths in real-world cases? paul