Date: Thu, 4 Jan 2001 13:46:22 GMT From: groggy@iname.com To: "Kerr, Greg" <akua@mailandnews.com> Subject: Re: ln bug? Message-ID: <200101041346.NAA08331@groggy.anc.acsalaska.net>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> > > is this a bug in "ln"? > > > > > > if i am in a directory with a file xxx: > > > > > > ln -s xxx /tmp/xxx > > > > > > will create link /tmp/xxx, but it will point to itself in /tmp. > > > ln is not pointing the link to to xxx in the current directory > > > as specified/intended on the command line. doesn't seem right. > > > > No, that's right. When making symbolic links, the first argument is > > the _string_ that the link points to. It is better to not think of > > symbolic links pointing to a specific file. Rather, when a symbolic > > link is processed as part of a path, the string value of the link is > > substituted. > > -- > > Crist J. Clark cjclark@alum.mit.edu > > That is a neat explanation for something that can be quite difficult to explain! > It might be worth pointing out to people getting their head around this > for the first time that the "_string_" may not necessarily exist as a file, symbolic links > can "point" to thin air. This is particularly irritating for > bad typists... > > Cliff what makes "ln" so special? it's only function is to reference a file/dir just like "cp" or "mv" or "rm" or any other utility operating on files. ok - it's valid to point to nothing, but that doesn't make it logical for it to be so incongruous with the operation of other utilities with respect to treating a "string" as relative if it has no leading slash ... is this a POSIX standard of "ln" operation? i dunno ... the man page states nothing about POSIX compatibility. is there a good reason for not parallelling all other utilities that operate on files with repect to recognizing relative pathnames as such? ps - thank you, and please ditto a copy off the list :) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200101041346.NAA08331>