[geocar]

Symlinks are not files, they do not have inodes and you cannot open them to fsync their contents.

They exist as directory entries with a small in-directory content only, thus syncing the directory they exist in is sufficient to persist them.

[icebraining]

Symlinks do have inodes, and their content (the link information) will be stored in that inode structure, if it fits, not in the directory.

See e.g. https://ext4.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Ext4_Disk_Layout#Symb...

[geocar]

Sorry, you're right, however this is an implementation detail, and nothing to do with POSIX which did not define any use for the `d_ino` field for a symbolic link[1]. I think this is made unnecessarily difficult by Linux/ext4 calling something an "inode" that is not what UNIX traditionally called an inode (or what POSIX calls a "file serial number").

I think it is more useful to think of the symbolic link as "inside" the directory it is in, because this tells the programmer what to do (and what to sync: the directory).

[1]: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/rea...

[yuubi]

An inode, traditionally, is the per-file data structure on disk (or in memory) that contains the user/group IDs, file type (plain/directory/device/etc; not jpeg/png/executable/etc), permissions, file size, and the location of the content (either a list of block numbers, or the address of a block containing the list if it wouldn't all fit into the fixed-size inode), among other things. These structures were identified by a number. This is an implementation detail not specified by POSIX.

A directory, historically (on systems with 14- or 30-character file name limits like we had in the 1990s, at least 4.2 or 4.3 BSD-derived), consisted of a file containing a list of (16-bit inode number, file name) structs, thus making a nice round 16 or 32 bytes per directory entry, evenly dividing a 512-byte block. On some older systems you could see this structure by opening and reading a directory with open and read (I think every system everywhere prohibited writes to a directory because modifying a directory would allow you to access files in unreadable directories, uncleanly delete any file given its inode number, etc). The only special thing about a directory on disk was that its inode said it was a dir, so the filesystem code would trust it as a source of inode numbers and otherwise use it as a dir.

Some of the 14-byte-name systems supported symlinks. As there was no space in the directory entry for anything other than an inode number, the link contents would have to be accessed through an inode. (I think I've heard of systems that could store very small file contents like typical symlink target names in the inode instead of allocating a data block, but can't name one).

The number you see in ls -i, which is sometimes called just the "inode" (and apparently also called the "file serial number"), is the number in the directory entry that's used to find the inode. I guess someone somewhere had or intended to have a system that could store symlinks in the directory instead of consuming an inode.

[caf]

The owning uid/gid has always been stored in the inode rather than the directory entry. Did symlinks traditionally have identical ownership to the containing directory?

[geocar]

Yes. IIRC this occurred sometime around SUSv2 (maybe a little earlier) when many filesystem implementations were storing the contents of the symbolic link physically outside of the directory listing.

[josefbacik]

You are confusing hardlinks with symlinks. They are similar but not the same. Symlinks in Linux most certainly get their own inode and can contain data blocks.