On 09/03/2012 10:20 PM, Bernhard Voelker wrote: > the question is what rm should remove: > the symlink or the target?
The convention in POSIX is that if a symlink is followed by '/', it's dereferenced. So this does appear to be a bug in coreutils 'rm'. I confirmed that the bug does not occur with Solaris 11 'rm': $ mkdir d $ touch d/file $ ln -s d dl $ ls -al * lrwxrwxrwx 1 eggert faculty 1 Sep 3 22:26 dl -> d d: total 16 drwxrwxr-x 2 eggert faculty 178 Sep 3 22:26 . drwxrwxr-x 3 eggert faculty 234 Sep 3 22:26 .. -rw-rw-r-- 1 eggert faculty 0 Sep 3 22:26 file $ rm -r dl/ $ ls -al * lrwxrwxrwx 1 eggert faculty 1 Sep 3 22:26 dl -> d Thanks for reminding me about "." and explaining why the other example is not a bug.
