Paul Eggert wrote: > 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
Same for FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE-p3: freebsd$ mkdir d; ln -s d s; /bin/rm -r s/; ls s@ But not with busybox 1.20.0-6: $ mkdir d; ln -s d s; busybox rm -r s/; ls d/ I have mixed feelings, but am leaning towards the Solaris 11/FreeBSD behavior.