You write:


# > Hmm, this sounds like the old (but neat) HP-Apollo links... ;-)
# > 
# Not quite - The Apollo variant symlinks used environment variables. This proposal
# has a fixed number of '@' tokens that have specific semantics. The token expansion
# is done in the lookup vfs op for specific filesystems. This is modelled after the
# '@sys' facility in AFS.

True...  

Any way to make this a *little* more extensible.  As a systems administrator,
I am sure I could find a use for other '@' tokens.  As an aside, how about
system wide evironment variables.  They could start with '@' instead of '$'.
Then for each process, the environment space would be initialized from the
'@' space first, then merged with the parents, and what was passed to it.

This could be something like the VMS (did I say VMS?) logicals.

This would make certain things a little easier.  For example, the name of
a machine would just become @hostname.  The name expansion could then be
performed on only '@' tokens, which only root can define, hopefully "solving"
the security problem.

The most likely candidates for '@'ing would be things like:
FULLNAME
HOME
LOGNAME
SHELL
TERM
TERMCAP
USER
HOST
ARCH
HOSTTYPE
HOSTNAME

I'm not quite awake here yet, just sort of thinking out loud.  Let me know
what you think...

--Toby.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
| Tobias Weingartner  |    PGP2.x Public Key available at       |
|   (204)725-3342     |  'finger weingart@austin.BrandonU.CA'   |
| %SYSTEM-F-ANARCHISM, the operating system has been overthrown |
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