Question

I am working on modifying the didactic OS xv6 (written in c) to support symbolic links (AKA shortcuts).
A symbolic link is a file of type T_SYM that contains a path to it’s destination.
For doing that, i wrote a recursive function that gets a path and a buffer and fills the buffer with the “real” path (i.e. if the path contains a link, it should be replaced by the real path, and a link can occur at any level in the path).

Basically, if i have a path a/b/c/d, and a link from f to a/b, the following operations should be equivalent:

cd a/b/c/d

cd f/c/d

Now, the code is written, but the problem that i try to solve is the problem of starting the path with “/” (meaning that the path is absolute and not relative).
Right now, if i run it with a path named /dir1 it treats it like dir1 (relative instead of absolute).

This is the main function, it calls the recursive function.
pathname is the given path, buf will contain the real path.

int readlink(char *pathname, char *buf, size_t bufsize){
    char name[DIRSIZ];
    char realpathname[100];

    memset(realpathname,0,100);
    realpathname[0] = '/';

    if(get_real_path(pathname, name, realpathname, 0, 0)){
       memmove(buf, realpathname, strlen(realpathname));
       return strlen(realpathname);
    }

    return -1; 
}

This is the recursive part.
the function returns an inode structure (which represents a file or directory in the system). it builds the real path inside realpath.
ilock an iunlock are being used to use the inode safely.

struct inode* get_real_path(char *path, char *name, char* realpath, int position){
    struct inode *ip, *next;
    char buf[100];
    char newpath[100];

    if(*path == '/')
        ip = iget(ROOTDEV, ROOTINO);// ip gets the root directory
    else
        ip = idup(proc->cwd); // ip gets the current working directory

    while((path = skipelem(path, name)) != 0){name will get the next directory in the path, path will get the rest of the directories
        ilock(ip);
        if(ip->type != T_DIR){//if ip is a directory
            realpath[position-1] = '\0';
            iunlockput(ip);
            return 0;
        }

        if((next = dirlookup(ip, name, 0)) == 0){//next will get the inode of the next directory
            realpath[position-1] = '\0';
            iunlockput(ip);
            return 0;
        }
        iunlock(ip);

        ilock(next);

        if (next->type == T_SYM){ //if next is a symbolic link
            readi(next, buf, 0, next->size); //buf contains the path inside the symbolic link (which is a path)
            buf[next->size] = 0;
            iunlockput(next);

            next = get_real_path(buf, name, newpath, 0);//call it recursively (might still be a symbolic link)

            if(next == 0){
                realpath[position-1] = '\0';
                iput(ip);

                return 0;
            }

            name = newpath;
            position = 0;
        }     
        else
        iunlock(next);

        memmove(realpath + position, name, strlen(name));
        position += strlen(name);
        realpath[position++]='/';
        realpath[position] = '\0';

        iput(ip);

        ip = next;
    }  
    realpath[position-1] = '\0';

    return ip;
}

I have tried many ways to do it right but with no success. If anyone sees the problem, i’d be happy to hear the solution.
Thanks,
Eyal

Answer 1

Ok, found the problem…
The problem was deeper than what i thought…
Somehow the realpath was changed sometimes with no visible reason… but the reason was the line:
name = newpath;

the solution was to change that line to
strcpy(name,newpath);

the previous line made a binding between the name and the realpath… which can be ok if we were not dealing with softlinks. When dereferencing a subpath, this binding ruined everything.

Thanks for the attempts