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Removing a directory in linux containing symlinks

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linux-howto

http://stackoverflow.com – I want to remove a nonempty directory in linux which has a directory structure inside it with bunch of symlinks. When I run rm -rf /direcory it removes not just all the symlinks and the directory, but also all the directories that those symlinks point to. Is there a command to just a directory which contains symlinks? (HowTos)

linuxletgo's picture
Submitted by linuxletgo on 12/18/2012

Stories similar to Removing a directory in linux containing symlinks

Hi,

I've just been reading old forum posts on how to get symlinks working with samba. Found that I needed to edit the /etc/smb.conf file and add the following entries into the Global section:

follow symlinks = yes wide links = yes unix extensions = no

And yes, this did allow my windows box to access the symlink directories.

I also read that there are security issues with enabling symlinks.

To quickly move around, I added a path to CDPATH that contains symlinks to different locations.

Use ProFTPd without chroot 16 weeks 3 days ago

Can I use ProFTPd without using a "chroot jail" (thereby preventing access to anything outside of the FTP root)?

I've noticed that ls -l doesn't only change the formatting of the output, but also how directory symlinks are handled:

> ls /rmn biweekly.sh daily.sh logs ...

> ls -l /rmn lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 18 Feb 11 2011 /rmn -> /root/maintenance/

I'd like to get a detailed listing of what's in /rmn, not information about the /rmn symlink.

One work-around I can think of is to create a shell

I'd like to rsync (backup) a chroot environment from outside the chroot. For that I first make a lvm snapshot of the chroot volume and then run rsync on that.

The only problem with this approach: Symlinks that inside the chroot are absolute are now pointing to the outer-chroot-system and are of course not matching.

Is is it possible to use the locate command to only find directories? To rephrase, I want to search for a directory, and exclude any result that is not a directory, such as files or symlinks to files.

While not necessary, I would like the solution to also return symlinks to other directories (but again, not files).

Lastly, I would like to exclude directories within foo, with one exception.

Tom Gundersen wrote: As of filesystem-2012.6-2 the folders /var/run and /var/lock will be replaced by symlinks to /run and /run/lock, respectively. On most systems this is already the case, as initscripts create the symlinks on boot.

I frequently move directory trees to other locations or copy their tarballs to other machines, and I would like to have a method to check whether any symlinks in a directory tree A point to locations outside of A since these will be broken in the moved / copied directory.

Possible Duplicate: How can I “relink” a lot of broken symlinks?

Is there any way to move a file to a new location, and then re-target its symlinks to the new location, using a shell script? I'd like to find a way to move a file programmatically without breaking its symlinks.