On 19/4/21 9:18 pm, Eli Schwartz wrote:
On 4/19/21 3:42 AM, Allan McRae wrote:
On 18/4/21 12:42 pm, Eli Schwartz wrote:
We do not need the --relative case as it is dead code (we only ever link a filename without directory components).
For the rest, GNU-specific ln -T does two things:
- if the link name is an existing directory, ln fails instead of creating a surprising link inside the directory - if the link name is a symlink to a directory, ln treats it as a file, and due to -f, unlinks it
The second case can be portably solved by ln -n, and the first case is not actually currently functional, but we can portably replace the error message with rmdir, so, why not?
Can we? That assumes the directory is non-empty and rmdir fails. I don't think removing an empty directory and replacing it with a symlink is expected behaviour.
Can we just abort with an error if the target is a directory?
I guess, but what's the difference between this and replacing a symlink to a directory?
"ln -Tfs" overwrites one but not the other. So it is staying consistent with the old behaviour. If we want to be consistent, don't replace a symlink to a directory either. Allan