rm etc. (was: Nasty Security Hole?)

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <816 at hadron.UUCP> jsdy at hadron.UUCP (Joseph S. D. Yao) writes:
-The confusion is boosted along by all those texts that explain the
-Unix tree-structured file system with a box at the top labelled "/"
-and lines to other boxes named "bin", "tmp", etc.  This is wrong, of
-course: the names go on the lines ...

100% right.

The UNIX file system design of inode data-objects (the "flat file
system") and multiple links to them (the "(sort of) hierarchical file
system", actually constrained to be a DAG (no relation)) is interesting
and useful, and deserves to be studied in its own right.  An attempt to
establish a conceptual mapping between this scheme and another file
system implementation that has a different structure must at some
point be misleading.