In Arch Linux, if I do ls -l in /sbin, I can see that reboot, shutdown and poweroff are all symlinks to /usr/bin/systemctl. But issuing reboot, shutdown and systemctl commands obviously does not all have the same behaviour.
I’m trying to emulate the process of path resolution (see man page path_resolution) in unix-like systems.
In a python script, I am creating a bunch of symbolic links chained together.
I’m trying to understand what cp --preserve=links does when used by itself, from my tests it seems that it copies a normal file normally and dereferences symlinks, but it seems like it just has the same effect as cp -L when used on a single file.
Unix systems usually just error out if they are confronted with a path that contains a symlink loop or just too many symlinks, because they have a limit to the number of symlinks they will traverse in one path lookup. But is there a way to actually decide if a given path resolves to something or contains a loop, even if it contains more links than a unix is willing to follow? Or is this a formally undecidable problem? And if it can be decided, can it be decided in a reasonable amount of time/memory (e.g. without having to visit all files on a filesystem)?
Symlinks have limitations in how functions like ls, mv, and cp can operate on them because unlike shell initiated commands like cd, these functions do not have information about how the user accessed the directory with respect to the logical path (see related post). It seems like using the mount --bind option instead can get an around this, offering increased functionality and compatibility with samba and other file servers because the mounted directory will then have two independent physical paths, instead of a link.
For use in a shell-script, I’m looking for a commandline-way to get the destination of a symbolic link. The closest I’ve come so far is stat -N src, which outputs src -> dst. Of course I could parse the output and get dst, but I wonder if there is some direct way of getting the destination.
I have a symlink with these permissions:
A hard link is defined as a pointer to an inode. A soft link, also known as a symbolic link, is defined as an independent file pointing to another link without the restrictions of hard links.
I want to take down data in /path/to/data/folder/month/date/hour/minute/file and symlink it to /path/to/recent/file and do this automatically every time a file is created.