standards/41576: POSIX compliance of ln(1)

[Wartan Hachaturow]

The following reply was made to PR standards/41576; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Wartan Hachaturow <wart at tepkom.ru>
To: Lukas Ertl <l.ertl at univie.ac.at>
Cc: bug-followup at freebsd.org, tjr at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: standards/41576: POSIX compliance of ln(1)
Date: Sat, 5 Jul 2003 00:30:46 +0400

 > cd /tmp
 > mkdir foo bar
 > ln -s foo bla     ### now /tmp/bla symlinks to /tmp/foo
 > ln -sf bar bla    ### replace /tmp/bla to point to /tmp/bar, doesn't work
 
 FreeBSD is perfectly SUSv3 (IEEE Std 1003.1, 2003)-compliant here. 
 http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/007904975/utilities/ln.html says
 that ln should use unlink() on destination in case of "-f" option
 used. And conformant implementation of unlink's  ".. path argument shall
 not name a directory unless the process has appropriate privileges and
 the implementation supports using unlink() on directories".
 Moreover, later, in informational section we see:
 "APPLICATION USAGE
     Applications should use rmdir() to remove a directory."
 
 FreeBSD's ln uses unlink() and behaves correctly on regular files, and it 
 should not work that way with directories.
 Bug may be closed, I guess, and ln(1) may be changed back.
 
 One thing that we may do is to make ln print a warning in case of -f on
 a directory, but I personally think it's not worth it.
 
 -- 
 Regards, Wartan.
 "Computers are not intelligent. They only think they are."