On Friday 02 December 2011 14:37:10, Pavel Emelyanov wrote:

On 12/02/2011 06:25 PM, Pedro Alves wrote:

quoted

On Friday 02 December 2011 14:17:08, Pavel Emelyanov wrote:

quoted

O_O   OK, I was wrong, they do live there. But I consider this as bug.

You can't change that.  It'd break current gdb at least.

OMG!

You know, NPTL didn't exist on earlier kernels.  This preserved
backwards compatibility.

quoted

quoted

I.e. each task will be shown multiple times, which is not very fun, but memory exhaustive from my POV.

Now that is a good argument against hard linking.  But not if you make
the entries under children/ symlinks.  Then find doesn't recurse.  And
then 

$ find -L /proc/PID/

does recurse and give you the whole tree.  Which I'd say is
actually useful...

It is useful, but the /proc/pid/children file solves the same problem in a much
more simple way. The memory usage by proc (one file vs one dir and a set of files)
is less and time to lookup a child is also less (read + lookup vs readdir + lookup 
(symlink itself) + lookup (symlink resolve)).

Yes, it doesn't allow you to have fun with find, but frankly, do you really need
this? Even if we're talking about gdb -- reading /proc/pid/children is not harder
and not easier than readdir-ing it.

IOW - what's the real benefit of a directory with symlinks against a file except
for a fun?

As I said on the first message, it's easier on the command line, likely for
quick scripting too.  And for consistency.  gdb or whatever other software
can of course do whatever programatically.  But if I can't persuade you guys
that's a good thing, fine.

-- 
Pedro Alves