Dear friends, I have encountered a problem using the command ln -sf to replace a symlink to a directory by a symlink to a different directory.
Working in a heterogenous environment with GNU/Linux and HP-UX workstations I found a different behaviour in this command's handling on the two operating systems. Contrary to the Unix behaviour (e.g. HP-UX) using this command on a GNU/Linux system does not replace the link, but creates a new link in the originally referenced directory. Is this a bug, or is this behaviour intentional? Example: Initial situation is a directory with two (empty) subdirs and a symlink, e.g. drwx... dir.0 drwx... dir.1 lrwx... dirlink -> dir.0 The command "ln -sf dir.1 dirlink" gives two different results on the different operating systems: On GNU/Linux systems the result is: drwx... dir.0 lrwx... dir.0/dir.1 -> dir.1 drwx... dir.1 lrwx... dirlink -> dir.0 Whereas on HP-UX systems the result is: drwx... dir.0 drwx... dir.1 lrwx... dirlink -> dir.1 If this behaviour of the GNU utilities is not intentional I could make a proposal of the necessary changes in ln.c (if you are interested). If this behaviour of the GNU utilities is indeed intentional I would suggest a related note in the documentation. With best regards, Peter Kratzer IT Administrator Philips Semiconductors GmbH Phone: +49 8151 270-105 Petersbrunner Str. 17 Fax: +49 8151 270-200 D-82319 Starnberg mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
