[NTLUG:Discuss] Is there a way to change permissions of a link

[Steve Baker]

Richard Cobbe wrote:

> However, you are correct, both hard and soft links are far more capable and
> consistent than Windows's shortcuts.  As far as I can tell, those are of
> interest ONLY to the explorer/desktop.  Trying to open a shortcut in, say,
> MS Word will get you an error (unless they've added code to Word to follow
> shortcuts; it wasn't there the last time I used Word).

This is typical of M$'s approach to that kind of thing - each application
has to separately handle these 'shortcuts'. Providing enough applications
do that, it starts to look like a proper OS feature - and the few applications
that don't do it start to look like they have bugs.

The same was true with things like file redirection in DOS.  Only programs
that bothered to look for a '>' on the command line would have redirection,
those that didn't do so just ended up trying to create files called '>'!

The Linux/UNIX philosophy of having the infrastructure take care of this
stuff and only the couple of specialised programs that need to know whether
something is a link or not have to take special care to get things right.
 
> Those commands like rm, cp, and tar which (can) behave differently for
> links will only change their behavior for symlinks, not hard links.
> There's actually no way for a process to distinguish between a normal file
> and a hard link to that file---primarily because, at the filesystem level,
> there *IS* no difference.

Yes.  The only difference (in the case of a hard link) is in the mind of the
person who created it.
 
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