ln -f

[David J. MacKenzie]

> Why don't the versions of ln that you know of on 4.3 BSD and SunOS 4
> use the rename system call?

Because rename doesn't do the same thing as ln.

If before you run ln, the file has n links, after you run ln
successfully the file will have n + 1 links.
If you just rename the file, it will still have n links, but one of
them will be different from before.
--
David J. MacKenzie <djm at eng.umd.edu> <djm at ai.mit.edu>