What it means is that you can't write a naive recursive tree traversal program 
when working with directories.  (Eg.  I want to write a PHP program that 
gives me a flat alphabetic index for an entire web site.)

Any idea about how to build a hash of i-nodes so that you traverse a cycle in 
the directory structure one-and-only one time?

(It's an elemental data structure problem--how to visit each node in a cyclic 
graph one-and-only one time.)

On Thursday 2004-02-19 16:17, Joe Toon wrote:
> I did the following for #1:
>
> $ ln -s filea fileb
> $ ln -s fileb filea
> $ cat filea  # symlink to a symlink
> cat: files: Too many levels of symbolic links
>
> Then I did the following for #2:
>
> $ mkdir test
> $ cd test
> $ ln -s ../test dirsym
> $ cd dirsym
>
> This allows me to enter dirsym indefinitely -- i could see something
> getting hung up over this if it followed the sym links..
>
> I would imagine this would be true for the final scenario as well.
>
> Trent Shipley wrote:
> > Is a *nix file system guranteed to be acyclic?
> >
> > That is no:
> >
> > File-a  links to file-b and file-b links to file-a
> >
> > And more important
> >
> > No directory-a contains link-b where link-b points to directory-a.
> >
> > Also
> >
> > Directory-a contains no link-b to directory-c where directory-c contains
> > link-d to directory-a.
>
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