On Thu, Nov 19, 2015 at 6:57 PM, Al Viro <viro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > How would those tools know that this particular pathname _is_ a magical > symlink? Like maybe just the AFS management tools? By design you'd only run them on the mountpoint in question. Not everything has to be "generic". Sometimes its' good enough to just have the ability to get the work done. Now, if it turns out that others also want to do this, maybe somebody decides "let's add flag -V to 'ls', which forces a 'readlink()' on all the targets, whether links or not, and shows the information". I could imagine other special files having "a single line of information about the file" that they'd expose with readlink(). Who knows? So there is *potential* for just making it generic, but that doesn't mean that it necessarily has to act that way. Linus -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html