A Formally Proved, Complete Algorithm for Path Resolution with Symbolic Links

A Formally Proved, Complete Algorithm for Path Resolution with Symbolic Links

Blog Article

In the context of file systems like those of Unix, path resolution is the operation that given a character string denoting an access path, determines the target object (a file, a Nightgowns directory, etc.) designated by this path.This operation is not trivial because of the presence of symbolic links.Indeed, the presence of such links may induce infinite loops.

We consider a path resolution algorithm that always terminate, detecting Scrapers if it enters an infinite loop and reports a resolution failure in such a case.We propose a formal specification of path resolution and we formally prove that our algorithm terminates on any input, and is correct and complete with respect to our formal specification.