[GLLUG] inodes and ls -dl

[Matt Graham]

On Thursday 20 November 2003 11:11, after a long battle with technology, 
Michael Cox wrote:
> ls -dl /usr/local
> This is supposed to display all the directories shared
> by the inode.

On my systems (Gentoo), ls -d without arguments displays the current 
directory . and that's it.  It's supposed to do that according to the 
man page for ls.  What does the tutorial mean when it says "all the 
directories shared by the inode"?  Each directory that exists has its 
own inode (you can't make hardlinks to directories--well, you *can*, 
but it's a bad idea) and a symlink has its own inode as well.

> The author lists about eight directories. While I realize that some 
> variance is to be expected, my SuSE 8.2 installation only the single
> directory. Is this a normal result and I am confused by the
> difference.

It's possible that the IBM tutorials in this case depend on older 
behavior of ls.  "ls --version" reports "coreutils 5.0" for me.

> Oh wait, I am using the Rieser File System, maybe I should be using 
> some other distro to follow this tutorial.

ReiserFS, ext3, and FAT32 give me the same results, so it's not anything 
to do with the filesystem.  

-- 
   Stupidity got us into this mess--why can't it get us out?
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see