Tom ponders:
> Other than the fact you found out why you couldn't do this (no disc space
> allocation), I thought that links at the "group" level couldn't be done at
> all (thinking in terms of security here)

No particular security concern that I can think of, but in general the idea
of creating "symbolic group links" was probably not thought about in great
depth by HP when they implemented Posix.

You'll find that some fraction of things that normally only work with groups
will work with the symlink and that others will not.

Some examples...

:NEWLINK /SYS/GROUP2,/SYS/GROUP1
:BUILD FILE.GROUP1
:RENAME FILE.GROUP2,FOOZ.GROUP1
:LISTF FOOZ.@,2

ACCOUNT=  SYS         GROUP=  GROUP1

FILENAME  CODE  ------------LOGICAL RECORD-----------  ----SPACE----
                  SIZE  TYP        EOF      LIMIT R/B  SECTORS #X MX

FOOZ              128W  FB           0       1023   1        0  0  *


ACCOUNT=  SYS         GROUP=  GROUP2

FILENAME  CODE  ------------LOGICAL RECORD-----------  ----SPACE----
                  SIZE  TYP        EOF      LIMIT R/B  SECTORS #X MX

FOOZ              128W  FB           0       1023   1        0  0  *

:REPORT G@
ACCOUNT       FILESPACE-SECTORS     CPU-SECONDS    CONNECT-MINUTES
   /GROUP       COUNT    LIMIT    COUNT    LIMIT    COUNT    LIMIT
SYS           3186304       ** 11929201       ** 22912829       **
   /GROUP1          0       **        0       **        0       **

So some MPE things like :LISTF will traverse the symlink as though it were a
real GROUP, but other things just really don't expect to find this sort of
thing.

:STORE FOOZ.@ will find both files but STORE is smart enough to know that
these are the same file internally.  I don't know that other tools are this
smart.  Some things assume that if you can name something using an MPE name
then there are no Posix HFS entities involved which isn't true in this case.

I suspect there are other weirder examples that one could dream up.

I haven't run into anything yet that did something really *bad* as a result
of thinking that what looks like a GROUP is really an HFS directory or a
symlink, but there certainly *could* be some things you would regret trying.

G.

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