Why do the permissions of a symbolic link default to all-permissive?

Question

When I create a hard link using ln:

ln testfile.txt testfile2.txt

The file hardlink, confirmed by the same inode numbers for both aliases in the inode table with ls -li, has the same initial permissions for the hardlinked file as the file with the original name:

1222285 -rw-------   2 cs9****-**  cs******        98 Apr  9 15:00 testfile.txt
1222285 -rw-------   2 cs9****-**  cs******        98 Apr  9 15:00 testfile2.txt

When I create a symbolic link, however:

ln -s testfile.txt testfile3.txt

and confirm again with the previous ls command, it show that it is a soft link with l in the permissions list. However, my symlink has all permissions for all user types (group, user, and other):

1222285 -rw-------   2 cs9****-**  cs******        98 Apr  9 15:00 testfile2.txt
1222285 -rw-------   2 cs9****-**  cs******        98 Apr  9 15:00 testfile.txt
1222286 lrwxrwxrwx   1 cs9****-**  cs******        12 Apr  9 15:08 testfile3.txt -> testfile.txt

This brings me to my questions:

1. Why are the initial permissions of a symbolic link all-permissive? I understand that is is a different filetype, but why does it start out with all initial permissions? From a question on UNIX/Linux.SE, I discovered that the default permissions for a directory are 777, which happen to be the same permissions as my symbolic link. Are the permissions of a directory and a symbolic link somehow related?

2. How can I create symlinks that have the same initial permissions as the original? Specifically, the reason I want do this is that I want to write a shell script to go into a single file system and make hard links and soft links depending on the type of file, and I want it to preserve the permissions.

Answer 1

Which platform are you working on? If you are on linux, then symlink permissions are not used at all, so whatever their value nobody cares. That could be different on BSD, OSX, or other flavors.

This question could be better answered on unix sub forum I guess.

I discovered that the default permissions for a directory are 777

Hmm, I don't really know where you get that from. Default permissions for file and directories (still on linux) just depend on the umask of the process. See man umask.