On Fri, Oct 03, 2003 at 12:48:36PM +0200, Pim Bliek | PingWings.nl wrote: > Hi all, > > English is not my native language. Does anyone know what 'dangling' means? It's 'hanging' with some suggestion of looseness, chaos, not neat and tidy. You can hang a weight on a piece of string, but if you cut the weight off the loose end of string is dangling. A light fitting hangs from the ceiling, but if you rip it down the loose ends of wires dangle. A fresh corpse hangs from a gibbet, but as it goes manky and bits fall off the word 'dangling' would start to be used. A 'dangling symlink' is one whose target does not exist; a piece of string with the weight cut off. Sometimes they are called 'hanging symlinks' but 'dangling' is a better fit. > I get the following errors emailed via cron every day: > > /etc/cron.daily/man-db: > mandb: warning: /usr/share/man/man8/ipfwadm.8.gz is a dangling symlink > mandb: warning: /usr/share/man/man8/fax500.8.gz is a dangling symlink > mandb: warning: /usr/share/man/man1/dnsdomainname.1.gz is a dangling symlink > mandb: warning: /usr/share/man/man1/atq.1.gz is a dangling symlink > mandb: warning: /usr/share/man/man1/atrm.1.gz is a dangling symlink > mandb: warning: /usr/share/man/man1/batch.1.gz is a dangling symlink > mandb: warning: /usr/share/man/man1/red.1.gz is a dangling symlink > mandb: warning: /usr/share/man/man1/nex.1.gz is a dangling symlink > mandb: warning: /usr/share/man/man1/nview.1.gz is a dangling symlink > mandb: warning: /usr/share/man/man1/ex.1.gz is a dangling symlink > mandb: warning: /usr/share/man/man1/vi.1.gz is a dangling symlink > > I shortened above list, it is quite a lot longer. > > Any suggestions? I think what's happened is that ipfwadm, fax500, etc. were originally installed with their man pages somewhere other than /usr/share/man/man* and had symlinks from /usr/share/man/man* to wherever the man pages really were. As the packages have been updated, the man pages have been moved around and so the symlinks no longer point to them. I don't know why this should have happened but occasionally it does. It's probably a fairly rarely-occurring bug in the packaging system whose effects are so trivial and harmless that nobody bothers to fix it since there are more important issues to deal with. Try reading the man pages: 'man 1 vi', etc. If you get a result you've got a man page for the package somewhere else on your MANPATH and you should therefore be safe to delete the symlink. If you get 'no manual entry for vi' reinstall the docs for the package. -- Pigeon Be kind to pigeons Get my GPG key here: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x21C61F7F
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