mount --bind

Most Linux and Unix file systems don't allow hard links to directories (except for the . and .. entries that mkdir creates itself). The reasons are are pretty obvious: you could really confuse programs like ls (ls -R), find and of course fsck if you created links that recursed back to themselves. If there was a compelling reason to allow directory hard links, you'd need to rewrite any program that wants to walk a file system tree to be aware of the possible problems.. So instead we have symlinks. You've probably used them for things like mount --bind /foo /home/fred/foo Fred can have full write permissions on /foo if he needs it, but he will not be able to remove /home/fred/foo. Not even root can: # rm -rf /home/fred/foo rm: cannot remove directory '/home/fred/foo': Device or resource busy Some related links you might find interesting: http://linuxgazette.net/issue93/tag/2.html *Originally published at Del.icio.us") | Yahoo! My Web A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com