blog/data/2010-08-30-fs-sematics.txt

   1 Title: Broken hard link handling with sshfs
   2 Tags: english, nuug, debian edu
   3 Date: 2010-08-30 19:30
   4
   5 <p>Just got an email from Tobias Gruetzmacher as a followup on my
   6 <a href="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/Broken_umask_handling_with_sshfs.html">previous
   7 post about sshfs</a>.  He reported another problem with sshfs.  It
   8 fail to handle hard links properly.  A simple way to spot this is to
   9 look at the . and .. entries in the directory tree.  These should have
  10 a link count >1, but on sshfs the count is 1.  I just tested to see
  11 what happen when trying to hardlink, and this fail as well:</p>
  12
  13 <pre>
  14 % ln foo bar
  15 ln: creating hard link `bar' => `foo': Function not implemented
  16 %
  17 </pre>
  18
  19 <p>I have not yet found time to implement a test for this in my file
  20 system test code, but believe having working hard links is useful to
  21 avoid surprised unix programs.  Not as useful as working file locking
  22 and symlinks, which are required to get a working desktop, but useful
  23 nevertheless. :)</p>
  24
  25 <p>The latest version of the file system test code is available via
  26 git from
  27 <a href="http://github.com/gebi/fs-test">http://github.com/gebi/fs-test</a></p>