Cannot overwrite an existing symbolic link

[Robert Langdon]

How could I create, in exact terms overwrite, an existing symbolic link
with ln?

According to the man page (let's have a look in the excerpt below) I
have to use the -f option.

If the link is an existing file, do not overwrite the
contents of the file. The -f option overrides this
option. This is the default behavior for /usr/xpg4/bin/ln,
and is silently ignored.

/usr/bin/ln
/usr/sbin/static/ln
/usr/xpg4/bin/ln
/usr/ucb/ln

No matter with which of the binaries above I am trying to overwrite an
existing symbolic link, I am getting an error. The environment is as
follows:

SunOS srvr2 5.9 Generic_122300-12 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-V440

rob@srvr2:~ $ touch source
rob@srvr2:~ $ touch 2ndsource
rob@srvr2:~ $ ln -s source foo
rob@srvr2:~ $ ln -s 2ndsource foo
ln: cannot create foo: File exists
rob@srvr2:~ $ ln -f -s 2ndsource foo
ln: cannot create foo: File exists
rob@srvr2:~ $ ln -n -f -s 2ndsource foo
ln: cannot create foo: File exists
rob@srvr2:~ $ ln -f -n -s 2ndsource foo
ln: cannot create foo: File exists

Thanks for any hints.

Regards,

Rob

[Dick Hoogendijk]

quoting Robert Langdon (Fri, 29 Feb 2008 19:35:42 +0100):
> How could I create, in exact terms overwrite, an existing symbolic
> link with ln?

Remove and recreate it.

> According to the man page (let's have a look in the excerpt below) I
> have to use the -f option.

Yes, I know. But I've never got it to work form me.
So, I remove and recreate and that works fine ;-)

--
Dick Hoogendijk -- PGP/GnuPG key: 01D2433D
++ http://nagual.nl/ | SunOS 10u4 08/07 ++

[Dave Uhring]

On Fri, 29 Feb 2008 21:39:52 +0100, Dick Hoogendijk wrote:

> quoting Robert Langdon (Fri, 29 Feb 2008 19:35:42 +0100):
>> How could I create, in exact terms overwrite, an existing symbolic
>> link with ln?
>
> Remove and recreate it.
>
>> According to the man page (let's have a look in the excerpt below) I
>> have to use the -f option.
>
> Yes, I know. But I've never got it to work form me.
> So, I remove and recreate and that works fine ;-)

Seems to be fixed in Nevada.

[duhring@einstein ~]$ uname -a
SunOS einstein 5.11 snv_82 i86pc i386 i86pc
[duhring@einstein ~]$ touch test
[duhring@einstein ~]$ touch test1
[duhring@einstein ~]$ ln -s test foo
[duhring@einstein ~]$ ln -s test1 foo

ln: cannot create foo: File exists

[duhring@einstein ~]$ ln -sf test1 foo
[duhring@einstein ~]$ ls -l foo
lrwxrwxrwx 1 duhring sysadmin 5 Feb 29 14:45 foo -> test1
[duhring@einstein ~]$ which ln
/usr/bin/ln

[Dick Hoogendijk]

Hey nice to know that. Funny but because it never worked for me I never
took the change to try if things have changed. Sure they have, that
innovation, is it not. I'm running SXDE 1/08 on other machines (s10 is
just for the server). Just tried it on sxde4 and it works ;-)

[Robert Langdon]

The background is, I have a cron job creating some logs on a daily
basis and would like to have a link on the newest one. Okay, I fixed it
already with a workaround using a tiny bash script which removes the
symbolic link if its existing. But hey, I thought I did something wrong
with my call as I could not imagine, that solaris have such bugs in
such basic commands and I have to invoke a second script with 5 lines
by cron just to overwrite an existing link.

But okay, the proof is the community. ;-)

Cheers,

Robert

[Thommy M.]

I would call it evolution...