Messages in this thread | | | From | John M Collins <> | Subject | Program-invoking Symbolic Links? | Date | Thu, 5 Aug 2004 15:04:26 +0100 |
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(Please CC any reply to jmc AT xisl.com as I'm not subbed - thanks).
I wondered if anyone had ever thought of implementing an alternative form of symbolic link which was in fact an invocation of a program?
Such a symbolic link would "do all the necessary" to fork off a new process running the specified program with input or output from or to a pipe depending on whether the link was opened for writing or reading respectively. RW access would probably have to be banned and the link would usually be read-only or write-only.
What I originally wanted was symbolic links (with "=>" as a possible notation).
latest_version.tar => "tar cf - /latest/and/greatest" latest_version.tgz => "gzip -c latest_version"
and the like, which I could link on a website so I didn't have to run around updating tar files/zip files/gzipped tar files etc each time I fix a bug in some package.
Such a scheme would let you implement things like hit counts on web sites "for free" without you having to rush out and run a CGI program as at present.
Obviously, a whole lot of semantics and options for signal handling $PATH name search etc would have to be built into the kernel (or possibly handled like ld-nnn.so), but the idea would seem to me to close one arguable "lack of orthogonality" between files and pipes.
You could argue that /proc is halfway there - I'd just like a user-specific version.
-- John Collins Xi Software Ltd www.xisl.com - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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