Variant symlinks
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

In computer programming, a variant symlink is a symlink that has a variable name embedded in it. This can allow some clever tricks to be performed that are not possible with a standard symlink.

Operating systems that make use of variant symlinks include Domain/OS and DragonFly BSD.

Here is an example from the DragonFly BSD mailing list archive:

sysctl -w vfs.varsym_enable=1

ln -s 'a${fubar}b' test

cat > axxb << EOF

HI!

EOF

varsym fubar=xx

cat test

References

• http://www.shiningsilence.com/mailarchive/kernel/2003-November/1557.html

The original article can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variant_symlinks.
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