Bug#204363: "cleanlinks" removes non-dangling symlinks to directories
On Wed, Aug 06, 2003 at 07:56:00PM +0200, Florian Ernst wrote:
> It appears the "cleanlinks"-script only checks for the symlinks-target
> "file" but not for "directory", so the following patch could fix it:
>
> --- /usr/bin/X11/cleanlinks.old 2003-02-26 01:52:11.000000000 +0100
> +++ /usr/bin/X11/cleanlinks 2003-08-06 18:40:30.000000000 +0200
> @@ -13,7 +13,7 @@
> (
> read i
> while [ X"$i" != X ]; do
> - if [ ! -f "$i" ]; then
> + if [ ! \( -f "$i" -o -d "$i" \) ]; then
> echo $i is a dangling symlink, removing
> rm -f "$i"
> fi
A slightly more portable version would be better, I think (using
parenthesis-grouping in [] is a bit dodgy):
- if [ ! -f "$i" ]; then
+ if ! ([ -f "$i" ] || [ -d "$i" ]); then
This still seems incomplete, though. What if it's a symlink to a device
node? We could simply do this instead to test whether the symlink is
truly dangling:
- if [ ! -f "$i" ]; then
+ if [ ! -e "$i" ]; then
XFree86 might not be able to do this if they want to run on Solaris,
whose /bin/sh doesn't understand test -e, but it's fine on any POSIX
system. Somebody might want to make sure that other shells return the
same result from test -e on a dangling symlink, but my reading of
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/utilities/test.html is
that any shell that doesn't is buggy.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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