Manu Jose wrote:
Hi Jason, "." represents the current working directory and ".." represents the parent directory of the current working directory . It is useful in various contexts. For example if u r currently in the directory /mnt/foo and want to copy the content of /mnt/foo1 to /mnt/foo just isuue the command " cp -R /mnt/foo1/* . " .So it is always good to represent the working directory with a short symbol and it is not at all a waste....
Manu
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Let me rephrase my question a little bit: BESIDES the obvious usage of "." entry, in terms of the filesystem, what is the purpose of "." entry?
The obvious answer is that you can refer to the current directory using "./", however, in order to look up the "." entry, the kernel must have a knowledge of the current directory in the first place, doesn't it? The kernel needs the directory table for the current directory to look up which inode the "." entry refers to. Doesn't that seem a little redundant, since the kernel already knows what the current directory is? If the kernel is already caching the current directory table, it might as well just cache the current directory's inode.
Coming back to my original question, does the kernel really need that "." entry? or is it purely for the user convenience?
cheers,
jz
-- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
