Management of symbolic links
AssigneeInternational Business Machines Corporation
InventorsUjjwal Lanjewar, Chanda Sethia, Yogesh Golwalkar
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Disclosed is a method of creating a symbolic link in a source file system to a target file in a target file system, the method including querying the target file system for an identifier of the target file; incrementing a reference counter of the target file, the reference counter indicating how many symbolic links the target file is a target of; and creating the symbolic link in the source file system, the symbolic link including the identifier received from the target file system in response to the query.
Claims6
A method of creating a symbolic link in a source file system to a target file in a target file system, the method comprising:
- receiving, by a source file system, an absolute path for a target file in a target file system;
- querying the target file system to determine an identifier of a file in the target file system with a path equal to the absolute path;
- responsive to determining the identifier of the file in the target system with a path equal to the absolute path, notifying the source file system of the identifier;
- creating the symbolic link in the source file system;
- and
- creating an inode in the source file system corresponding to the symbolic link, the inode having metadata including the identifier and a delay parameter value, the delay parameter value useable to determine whether the target file in the target file system has been replaced with a new file at the absolute path.
A method of accessing a target file in a target file system through a symbolic link in a source file system, the method comprising:
- querying the target file system utilizing an identifier of the target file, the target file belonging to the target file system at a target file path;
- determining whether an entry exists for the target file in a table of the target file system based on the identifier, the entry indicating that the target file is a target of a symbolic link;
- responsive to determining that the table contains an entry for the target file, determining whether the entry indicates a time difference;
- responsive to determining that the entry indicates a time difference, comparing the time difference to a delay parameter value for the symbolic link, the delay parameter value received from the source file system;
- and
- responsive to determining that the time difference is greater than the delay parameter value, returning a new file path to the source file system of the target file.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.