On Monday 05 February 2007 13:20, James D. Parra wrote:

...

rm -fR <name_dir_softlink>

This is exactly what you said that you did not want to do.

~~~

That is correct. If I us rm <name_dir_softlink>, rm says it can't remove a dir. ~~~

Let me correct the above statement. That is what I 'thought' it might say, however that is not the case. 'rm' removes the softlink to the dir'.

There's a subtlety w.r.t. to symlinks that point to directories. That is, if the name of the symlink is followed by a slash (and nothing else), then the target directory is operated on. If no trailing slash is present, then the symlink itself is used, at least in some circumstances. For example: % mkdir /tmp/sld % cd /tmp/sld % mkdir targetDir % ln -s targetDir symlink % ls -Fl total 0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 rschulz users 9 2007-02-05 13:26 symlink -> targetDir/ drwxr-xr-x 2 rschulz users 6 2007-02-05 13:26 targetDir/ % touch targetDir/file{1,2,3} % ls -l targetDir total 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 rschulz users 0 2007-02-05 13:26 file1 -rw-r--r-- 1 rschulz users 0 2007-02-05 13:26 file2 -rw-r--r-- 1 rschulz users 0 2007-02-05 13:26 file3 % ls -l symlink lrwxrwxrwx 1 rschulz users 9 2007-02-05 13:26 symlink -> targetDir % ls -l symlink/ total 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 rschulz users 0 2007-02-05 13:26 file1 -rw-r--r-- 1 rschulz users 0 2007-02-05 13:26 file2 -rw-r--r-- 1 rschulz users 0 2007-02-05 13:26 file3 % rm symlink % ls -Fl total 0 drwxr-xr-x 2 rschulz users 42 2007-02-05 13:26 targetDir/ % ln -s targetDir symlink % rm symlink/ rm: cannot remove `symlink/': Not a directory To further compound this idiosyncracy, command completion on a symlink that refers to a directory adds the trailing slash automatically.

Thanks again,

~James

Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org