OPEN, STATUS='NEW' of a symbolic link to a non-existing file.

[N.M. Maclaren]

On Sep 16 2009, Steve Kargl wrote:
>
>As you know, the unix philosophy is that everything is a file.
>symlinks (and directories and devices and ...) may by special
>files, but nonetheless they are files.

Er, not really.

There are two separate concepts associated with the word "file" in Unix.
One is an entry in the filing system namespace, and there such things are
files.  The other is a direct-access 'disk' file, as distinct from some
other kind of external data entity (such as a device).  The reason that
this is relevant is that existence refers to the name in the first case,
and to the actual data in the second, and then only when it is a 'disk'
file.


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.