Thoughts on Multi-Symlink Concept

[Jason Hellenthal]

Hi All,

Now I already know the thoughts on symlink hell within filesystems all to
well considering most Linux flavoring's. But I am curious as to what all
your opinions would be to add symlink support to multiple target files much
like what you could do with cat(1) or portalfs to include a bunch of files
in one instance but similar to the following examples in place of such.

Instead of: cat /path/to/files*
ln -sm /path/to/files* ./my_concat_list
cat ./my_concat_list

Or

ln -sm  /path/to/file1  /path/to/file2 ./my_concat_filters
pfctl -v -f ./my_concat_filters

Personally while I know it's a hack, but I feel it would bring some glue to
programs and other such situations that do not have file include support
and add support per-say way to create a repeatable playlist to shorten user
operations at any given time.

Obviously this isn't anywhere else implemented and would need to be a BSD
extension of ln(1) but I find that it could be a beneficial feature for
those that could use it to its full potential.

I've thought about the same instance also being done with hardlinks but I
keep coming across the idea that there are too many race conditions that
would be found with that.

Anyway . . . opinions, thoughts, ideas, criticism . . . welcome.


Thanks for your time.