On Sat, 7 Jan 2012, logical american wrote: > I was manually running the "rm -r * " command > > cd /backup/lib > rm -r * > cd ../lib32 > rm -r * > cd ../lib64 > rm -r * > > and then things stopped working at this point > > but lib64 was a symbolic link to /lib, I believe, which I believe was > pointing back to /lib on the main system, not /lib on my backup drive.
Yeah, that sounds likely. By cd'ing into the link (lib64 -> /lib) you moved to /lib, and rm -r *'ed as indicated. However, if you hadn't cd'ed into the link, the rm would have just removed the symbolic link, and not the files in the dir the link points to (cd /backup; rm -r *). Or, you could test that the entity you want to cd into is a real directory, rather than a link, before doing the cd and remove step (man test). -- David Fleck [email protected] _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
