first off, whats the proper nix term for a 'shortcut' directory? symlink er something?

anyway,

the detailed question is... i have 'mannual' directory in my /var/www/html (DocumentRoot for Apache) and I would like to remove it.

ls -l shows:

manual -> ../../../usr/share/doc/apache-manual-1.3.26/

and that to me, looks like it's a link to the real dir... how do i remove that "manual" dir and it's link?

thanks!

HA!

# unlink manual

why is it that I ALWAYS find my answer right after I post sorry but hey, atleast it's here for others to find!

Well I'm not sure how far you got on that but I think you got a few things mixed up. I'm not sure if I got everything right but as far as I know it's like this.

You can have hard links and symbolic links. Hard links only work on files and symbolic links can be done for both files and directories. You can create links with the following command 'ln sourcename targetname'. If you want it to be a symbolic link then you should add a -s to the ln command. You can't identify hard links by doing a ls -l. They just look like normal files although they physically all point to the same file. Once all links to the file are removed then the file itself is actually removed. If you do a ls -l for symbolic links then you will see the output like you showed:
targetname -> sourcename

You can remove symbolic links by just using the rm command. Now about the link and unlink commands. I don't have them on my linux system, I could however find them on a system with Digital Unix. But you can accomplish the same with ln and rm so they aren't really necessary.

Hope that helps.