Strange Tree

[linuxguy at ici.net (Christoph)]

> On Mon, 2 Aug 1999 Chris DiTrani <cditrani at ne.mediaone.net> wrote:
> 
> > I've noticed that on 2 RH5.2 and on 6.0 machines I have this strange
> > recursive tree: /usr/bin/mh/mh/mh/mh/mh/mh........ It seems to go on for
> > quite a while this way, and as far down as I travel into it there seems to
> > exist the same files. I can't imagime this is normal. Anyone seen this?
> 
> /usr/bin/mh is a symlink to ".", which makes /usr/bin/mh a reference to
> /usr/bin. The behavior you're seeing is a natural side effect of this.
> 
> /usr/bin/mh is the original installation directory for the Rand MH, and
> some third-party tools depended on it; hence the symlink to maintain
> backwards compatibility.

In my opinion, this is a silly hack.  If RedHat builds the packages from
source, they should be able to control things better than this.

A few years back, this type of recusive linking provided endless headaches
when used with tar, find & cpio, and even worse was the unix-unaware vender
that ported crummy code.



+------------------------
| christoph
| linuxguy at ici.net
| http://home.ici.net/~linuxguy


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