#10 Missing commad for checking if a given field object is a link

[Jan Kotanski]

Hi,

I think it would be good to have possibility during reading a H5 file to check if the current field is a real field or just a soft link and if so what is its target.
I don't see any command to perform such operation.

Cheers,
Jan

[Eugen Wintersberger]

This is a difficult thing. In the HDF5 world virtually everything is a link. An object can either be a soft- or a hard-link. To each object at least one hard-link must be avaiable to make it accessible. Deleting an object virtually means to remove this single hard-link (that is why you cannot really remove an object from a file - you can only make it inaccessible). To make things easy I did not provide any facility to check for the existance of links (not even in the C++ API). I could but this to the feature request list of the C++ API. Once this feature is implemented there one can map it through to the Python interface. I suggest that only soft-links are identified as "links" in order to avoid confusion.

regards
Eugen