CODEWITHSUNDEEP
linuxbashshellunixcommand-line
shafeeq
shafeeq

Reputation: 1589

Changing symbolic link in linux

Let me show my problem through screen shots. This is my first terminal. I changed the link from another terminal say terminal2. My problem is highlighted in this screen shots. Here the ls returns content of test1 folder after I changed the link into test2.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 4323

Answers (4)

Chris Dodd
Chris Dodd

Reputation: 126213

The thing that is confusing you is that the pwd builtin doesn't actually tell you the current working directory -- it tells you the path that you used to get to the current working directory.

If you want the actual current working directory, you need the -P flag:

$ pwd -P

which will give you something like /home/darkknight/test1.

Upvotes: 2

Didier Trosset
Didier Trosset

Reputation: 37437

What you describe is the expected behavior.

$ mkdir test1
$ mkdir test2
$ touch test1/t1
$ touch test2/t2
$ ln -s test1 test
$ cd test
$ ls
t1
$ rm ../test
$ ln -s test2 ../test
$ readlink ../test
test2
$ ls
t1
$

Simply imagine that when you cd test you actually enter test1. You can then change the symbolic link test to whatever you want -and even delete it!- you are still in test1.

$ pwd
test
$ readlink `pwd`
test2
$

For sure, readlink returns test2, as it goes and read the current test link that has been changed to test2. However, at the time you cd into test, the link was to test1. And you are still in the test1 directory.

Of course, if now you change to the test directory, you'll be in test2.

$ cd ../test
$ ls
t2
$

One last thing, to clarify. Directory test does not exist. You cannot enter nor be in this directory. Whenever you cd test, you enter the directory the test symbolic link currently points to (here test1).

After you've entered the test1 directory, you can change the test symbolic link to whatever you want, you'll still be in test1.

Upvotes: 2

Martin Cowie
Martin Cowie

Reputation: 2601

That second call to readlink doesn't do what you think

darkknight@localhost:~/test$ readlink \`pwd`/home/darkknight/test2`

The description for readlink in the man page is

Display value of a symbolic link on standard output

readlink is a read-only operation. You will also find the value of $? to be non-zero after this, meaning this has failed because test2 is not a symlink.

Replace it with another call to ln -s -f (where -f stands for force) ...

darkknight@localhost:~$ ln -s -f test2 test

Not all distros honor -f so you may have to remove the symlink first:

darkknight@localhost:~$ rm test; ln -s test1 test

Upvotes: 2

JC-
JC-

Reputation: 1290

Now I changing the link to test2 from another terminal : the command should be

rm -fr test;ln -s test2 test; cd test

Upvotes: 1

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