Suppose you are running Ubuntu and you have a Samba share called /share and a folder called /Archive, and to give network access to /Archive you want to create a soft link to it in /share. Being a newbie, you screw up the ln command. Instead of

ln -s /Archive /share/Archive

you reverse the order of the params and type

ln -s /share/Archive /Archive

At first it says permission denied, so you brilliantly add "sudo" and do it again. It works! Instead of your original /Archive folder with its tons of files, you now have a useless link called /Archive that points to /share/Archive which doesn't exist.

Let's be realistic and say I did this instead of you. Am I totally hosed, or is there a way to fix this and re-point /Archive to the physical location that it originally pointed to?

I don't know of any version of ln that is broken in such a way, to accomplish what you indicate occurred.

However you managed to delete the directory, you will need to restore from backup.

I have attempted to recreate the series of events.

1. created a folder /share
2. created a folder /Archive
3. ran ln -s /share/Archive /Archive (received permissions issue)
4. ran sudo ln -s /share/Archive /Archive

This, however does not link /Archive to a non existant /share/Archive.

It links /Archive/Archive to a non existant /share/Archive

You can remove by sudo rm /Archive/Archive

Always be careful with rm commands especially when using sudo!

If this is not the case for you, then I can only sympathise and agree that you would need to restore (if you have a backup)

Thank you for such fast responses! What happened was exactly as Disillusionist stated. It was a misinterpretation on my part. I deleted the Archive subfolder, created the link properly and everything is fine.