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[[meta title="Lexical .. Resolution"]]

For historical reasons, [[UNIX]] filesystems have a real (hard) `..` link from each
directory pointing to its parent. However, this is problematic, because the
meaning of "parent" really depends on context. If you have a symlink for
example, you can reach a certain node in the filesystem by a different path. If
you go to `..` from there, UNIX will traditionally take you to the hard-coded
parent node -- but this is usually not what you want. Usually you want to go
back to the logical parent from which you came. That is called "lexical"
resolution.

Some application already use lexical resolution internally for that reason. It
is generally agreed that many problems could be avoided if the standard
filesystem lookup calls used lexical resolution as well. The compatibility
problems probably would be negligable.

The goal of this project is to modify the filename lookup mechanism in the Hurd
to use lexical resolution, and to check that the system is still fully
functional afterwards. This task requires understanding the filename resolution
mechanism. It's probably a relatively easy task.

See also [[GNU_Savannah_bug 17133]].

Possible mentors: ?

Exercise: Make some modification to the name lookup mechanism. (More specific
suggestions welcome... :-) )