On Apr 8, 2005 11:14 PM, Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer@xxxxxxxxx> > I thought about your question when you first asked it, and again now. > In a generic sense I can't think of a reason that the '.' entry is > mandatory. As you say there seem to be ways to track the same info > without have that specific directory entry. I suppose it's just a traditional concept. Long time ago the firt UNIX developers thought it would be better to have the '.' entry there rather than implementing '.' in code. Furthermore, on traditional UNIX filesystems, the existence of '.' entry is the eason for incrementing the rference count of an inode containig the directory. If it wasn't there, the fs root directory would have reference count of zero and would therefore be invalid (to be deleted). So basically, it's better to have it there, rather than providing for exceptions. HTH Martin -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
