Re: permissions

[bampton () cs utk edu (Howard the Energizer)]

In a message posted Tuesday, May 17 "Perry E. Metzger" writes:

> Howard the Energizer says:
> > I certainly found it useful, and as far as I know few people have
> > funky sym-links like foo -> ../../../bar/foo 
>
> Path relative symlinks come in handy all the time -- its simply untrue
> that few people use them.

In a business or Unix knowledgable environment, I'd agree that they 
are non uncommon.

In an academic environment, where 50% of the users have troubles
distingusing between exiting vi (:q) and exiting out of a shell, the
difference between "ln -s /navy/homes/bampton/bin/foo ." and
"ln -s ../../../bampton/bin/foo ." is totally lost. Most of the time
they don't even make symbolic links, they copy the file, because
copying it is "easier".

The script in question also dealt correctly with relative path names
like ../foo and ../../foo, just not the general case.

Howard