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Softlinks - cannot delete

This is the result from a posting I had on the Newbie forum, but I still don't have an answer. Maybe somone specialized in Red Hat would know what the problem could be?

I made a softlink "ln -s" from the directory /var/www/html/public_html --> /home/ddd/public_html
but now I want to delete public_html so I tried;

Code:



rmdir /var/www/html/public_html but I got the error:

rmdir: `public_html/': Not a directory

Then I tried;

Code:



rm -d /var/www/html/public_html but I got the error:

rm: cannot remove directory `public_html/': Is a directory

Any solutions out there?

DaJoMu

---------------------------------------------------------------

How exactly did you issue the
ln
?
And what does
ls -ld /var/www/html
have to say about it?

Cheers,
Tink

------------------------------------

I issued the softlink in this manner

Code:



ln -s /home/ddd/public_html /var/www/html/public_html





ls -ld /var/www/html/public_html  

drwxr-xr-x  2 ddd ddd 4096 Aug 15 19:49 /var/www/html/public_html/

Code:



ls -ld /var/www/html

drwxr-xr-x  5 root root 4096 Aug 15 20:18 /var/www/html/

yes, I am logged on as root.

-------------------------------------

How bizarre :)

That's an actual directory. And ln -s should have failed.

rm -rf /var/www/html/public_html
should work.

Cheers,
Tink

------------------------------------------------------

Not working ( post #5)

Code:



rm -rf /var/www/html/public_html/

rm: cannot remove `/var/www/html/public_html/': Not a directory

I could probably just leave it like this, but if anyone got
other suggestions that would be nice?

Let me say this is a Clarkconnect 3.1 server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux / CentOS 4 core

Code:



uname -a

Linux gateway.xxx.xxx  2.6.9-19.cc #1 Fri Jul 8 18:40:48 EDT 2005 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

Is there any difference between these two:

Code:

ls -l /var/www/html/public_html

ls -l /var/www/html/public_html/

(Note the lack of trailing slash in the first line; some shells may add or remove the trailing slash when completing, so pay attention.)
If it really is a symlink then the first should tell you about the symlink and the second should tell you about the directory it points to.

Also check

Code:

alias ls

to check if ls is aliased to have certain options. In particular, the options "-L" and "-p" may cause ls to follow the symlink.

softlinks - cannot delete

Output from the suggested commands

Code:

ls -l /var/www/html/public_html

Shows where the symlink points to.

Code:

ls -l /var/www/html/public_html

lists out the content in /home/ddd/public_html

Code:

alias ls

alias ls='ls --color=tty'

Code:

alias -p ls

alias cp='cp -i'

alias l.='ls -d .* --color=tty'

alias ll='ls -l --color=tty'

alias ls='ls --color=tty'

alias mv='mv -i'

alias rm='rm -i'

alias which='alias | /usr/bin/which --tty-only --read-alias --show-dot --show-tilde'

alias ls='ls --color=tty'

alias -L ls does not work

DaJoMu

I don't know what to tell you, except just to do this again:

Code:

rm /var/www/html/public_html

amd make sure not to have a trailing slash.

Thank you so very much Spoon. The solution was the trailing /
Since I used tab to finish the line the / always was present.

I learned something new today.

Thanks