On Monday 16 December 2002 22.33, John Andersen wrote:
The OP was obviously from a windows environment where Bill Gates just "invented" links last year, and therefore they can be quite mysterious.
I agree, they need to be documented. But windows has had shortcuts for a long time, and conceptually they're not that different. The details differ greatly, but ideas like "removing the link does not remove the file it points to" are there.
And thinking of a link as a file is NOT correct. Its just another pointer to a file, essentially another directory entry pointing to the file,
Not a symlink. A symlink has its own inode. A hard link is "just another directory entry" but a symlink is more. That's why you can have symlinks to files on other partitions but not hard links.
and it acts quite differently than the actual file. (You can change permissions on a symbolic link till you are blue in the face and still achieve the desired results.) RMing the link may, or may not, remove the file, etc.
Well, true, and that's what the manual entry for symlinks should focus on: what's different. Then it can refer to the general section on files for the basic stuff such as rm.
The man pages for link, symlink, and ln, all sort of gloss over the removal aspect.
In short it seems obvious to you and I, but its not unreasonable for a new linux user to be confused about this point.
I guess not. maybe manuals should emphasise the unix idea "everything is a file" more strongly?!