problems removing a symoblic link

SerfurJ · 12-12-2003, 01:44 PM

i am baffled by this nonsense. i'm trying to remove the symbolic link "/home/jason/tmp" -> /tmp. it's on fedora core with the bash shell.

[1075 root 13:37:07 /home/jason]$rm tmp/
rm: remove directory `tmp/'? y
rm: cannot remove directory `tmp/': Is a directory
[1076 root 13:37:10 /home/jason]$rmdir tmp/
rmdir: `tmp/': Not a directory
[1077 root 13:38:15 /home/jason]$rm -rf tmp/
rm: cannot remove `tmp/': Not a directory

trickykid · 12-12-2003, 01:52 PM

Can you give the output after cd'ing into your home directory:

ls -al tmp

BlurredWeasel · 12-12-2003, 01:58 PM

There is a known bug in rm (that apparently is a bitch to fix...) that makes removing a sym link of a directory act wierd.

Try:

Quote:

rm -r tmp

Note the no trailing slash on that. I had this same problem a week or 2 ago and it took me 10 minutes of googling to find out.

Hope that helps
Chris

SerfurJ · 12-12-2003, 02:01 PM

"rm -r tmp" worked. thanks a lot.

jason