>> Other people are of the opinion that the invention of the symbolic link
quoted text
>> was a huge mistake.
>
> I guess I haven't heard that one.  What is the argument that we were
> better off without symbolic links?

Numerous security bugs in tar (extracting a specially crafted archive with 
symlinks could overwrite arbitrary file) and in coreutils.

For example, to walk directory path without following symlinks, you must 
break the path to elements and repeatedly use
h = open(element, O_RDONLY | O_NOFOLLOW);
fchdir(h);
--- latest coreutils have it, but it's obvious that a lot of 
file-manipulation programs doesn't, making them unsafe to operate on 
user's directories from root account.

Mikulas
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