Timeline for Actual content of a symlink file
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 9, 2023 at 12:01 | comment | added | Sergio Abreu | The funny part of dumping is to see that it inverts the order of the pairs of bytes. I suppose is because of the "little endian style" of storing data. For example banana becomes abanan, you must flip the pairs | |
| Apr 5, 2023 at 12:09 | comment | added | ilkkachu | @blubberdiblub, my comment there was just a side note on how the answer here implies that both symlinks and small files might be saved inside the inode. I know it's not really relevant to the question about reading the symlink from an application -- which why it was just a comment. | |
| Apr 5, 2023 at 8:47 | comment | added | blubberdiblub | @ilkkachu well, after rereading the question of OP, I may have misinterpreted it and went on that wrong assumption and wrong context, so in that light I guess not. My apologies | |
| Apr 4, 2023 at 21:54 | comment | added | blubberdiblub | @ilkkachu where the filesystem actually stores the content of a symlink (i.e. in the inode, in some metadata, in some (b/rb/whatever)tree or in actual data extents) is irrelevant for applications. Other filesystems can store regular files in other places than data extents. And some filesystems don't even have inodes. Regular applications aren't concerned with how/where the payload of files is stored and treat the VFS as a black box. They just tell the kernel/glib "give me the content" or "stat the metadata associated with the path" or something like that. | |
| Sep 16, 2020 at 10:36 | comment | added | ilkkachu | As far as I understand, ext4 only stores symlinks embedded in the inode, not regular small files. And ext4 is rather common. | |
| Sep 15, 2020 at 8:37 | history | edited | user313992 | CC BY-SA 4.0 | added 118 characters in body |
| Sep 15, 2020 at 8:31 | history | answered | user313992 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |