Yes, at the risk of sounding arrogant, what is this doing on the front page of HN? This isn't a security flaw and it isn't new, it's a well-understood Unix design decision.
If the aim was to educate people about Unix design principles, then it would have been useful to include references to the relevant specifications:
or at least have some meaningful discussion about the rationale for this design and its consequences. But this is just a statement of well-known fact with no context or added value, placed behind a link-bait title.
Your point is well taken. I did not mean to imply that this is bad design decision on the part of Unix. I was also trying to articulate why the current behavior makes sense by describing the mechanics of inodes. However in my experience many novice developers, especially those with limited knowledge of Unix, find this behavior quite surprising. Delving into this curiosity presents a good jumping off point for finding out more about Unix file systems (and, yes, this is all the more reason including references). The HN audience surely includes many people, such as yourself, that consider this to be completely common knowledge but the fact that at least 9 people found the article useful indicates otherwise.
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Yes, at the risk of sounding arrogant, what is this doing on the front page of HN? This isn't a security flaw and it isn't new, it's a well-understood Unix design decision.
If the aim was to educate people about Unix design principles, then it would have been useful to include references to the relevant specifications:
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/un...
or at least have some meaningful discussion about the rationale for this design and its consequences. But this is just a statement of well-known fact with no context or added value, placed behind a link-bait title.
Your point is well taken. I did not mean to imply that this is bad design decision on the part of Unix. I was also trying to articulate why the current behavior makes sense by describing the mechanics of inodes. However in my experience many novice developers, especially those with limited knowledge of Unix, find this behavior quite surprising. Delving into this curiosity presents a good jumping off point for finding out more about Unix file systems (and, yes, this is all the more reason including references). The HN audience surely includes many people, such as yourself, that consider this to be completely common knowledge but the fact that at least 9 people found the article useful indicates otherwise.