hard link not working

ghee22 · 08-25-2005, 04:44 PM

i'm gonna try to make this as simple as possible
i'm trying to make a hard link from my .cshrc file to a sourceme.csh in different directory. when this works, i'll add other people's .cshrc file to be hard linked to sourceme.csh
as root i

Code:

ln sourceme.csh ../people/baxi/.cshrc
ls -l ../people/baxi/.cshrc
-rw-r--r--    2 root     root         2162 Aug 25 17:37 ../people/baxi/.cshrc

i edit sourceme.csh and prepend it with "freklja"
i save and exit. i edit sourceme.csh AGAIN just ot check if the changes were made, YES, they were.

i edit ../people/baxi/.cshrc and the changes are NOT preserved! I'm confused at this point. I've studied hard link & soft links through many LQ posts and it just doesn't work.

I tried symbolic links than by first removing my .cshrc file and then doing this

Code:

ln -s sourceme.csh ../people/baxi/.cshrc
ls -l ../people/baxi/.cshrc
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root           12 Aug 25 17:38 ../people/baxi/.cshrc -> sourceme.csh

i try to edit it and it say file exists but cannot be read... i open up a new terminal which reads people's baxi's .cshrc and nothing goes through!

i'm really confused about now.. this is all on RHEL Server 3. I'm actually SSHing into that machine through a RHEL WS 4 .

spooon · 08-26-2005, 04:11 PM

when you give the relative location "sourceme.csh" for the symbolic link at "../people/baxi/.cshrc", it takes it as relative to the location of the link; i.e. it looks in "../people/baxi/sourceme.csh" which might not be what you want.

alternatively, you should either give an absolute path, or a relative path with respect to the location of the link. as a general rule, i usually create symlinks when i'm in the directory where the link will be; that way, i don't get confused about specifying the relative path of the source file

ghee22 · 08-30-2005, 12:38 PM

ok... i tried using an absolute path... it still doens't update /alpha/people/baxi when i update /alpha/software/.cshrc

is it because it's a regular file?

Matir · 08-30-2005, 01:04 PM

Depending on your editor, it may make a "backup" of the file first, which would ruin the hardlinking.

For symlinks, I would do:

Code:

cd /alpha/people/baxi
ln -s /alpha/software/sourceme.csh .cshrc

ghee22 · 08-31-2005, 11:52 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Matir
Depending on your editor, it may make a "backup" of the file first, which would ruin the hardlinking.

For symlinks, I would do:

Code:

cd /alpha/people/baxi ln -s /alpha/software/sourceme.csh .cshrc

i use emacs... what do you suggest and please don't say vi!

also, i tried symlink with absolute paths the way you wrote it and it still doens't point to same file.. maybe because of emacs as well?

Matir · 08-31-2005, 12:46 PM

What does 'ls -l /alpha/people/baxi/.cshrc' show?

Does the link work before you try to edit the file?