Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Wed, 19 Jun 1996 09:25:38 -0600 (MDT) | From | Marc Aurele La France <> | Subject | Re: [Take II] Eliminating symlink recursion |
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On Tue, 18 Jun 1996, Kjetil Torgrim Homme wrote:
> Excuse me, I do not understand why this logic is useful.
> Since you put in a threshold (and I think you were right in adding > it), you can not make arbitrarily complex, but correct webs of > symlinks. So you lose the generality you had before.
Not entirely, the new limit can be changed or even disabled at compile time, presumably by the sys admin.
> So, the benefit is then that you can detect loops before the threshold > is reached. However, it looks like the overheads are very high, and I > would be surprised if it was a win even for the simple case (which > gives the greatest gain).
Well, given the linear search I use to find duplicates, I would expect that resolving a pathname to an inode is O(n^3), where n is the number of symlinks that need to be followed. This could be improved, I suppose. Worst-case memory requirements, however, are O(n).
Marc.
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