bug#79445: `ln -s` should raise a warning about pwd-relative vs symlink-location-relative targets
Chris <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.gnu.core-utils.bugs |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <CAPvCkbikc5FPmMGhBzVN3cxiBxLEUM7K_sgQDfQuO_QQeWqukA@mail.gmail.com> |
When my current working directory is `/foo` and contains `bar` and I need `/example/bar` to be a symlink to `/foo/bar`, it seems intuitive that `ln -s bar /example/bar` should accomplish that. But it doesn't; instead it makes `/example/bar` a symlink that points to itself, because `ln -s` makes relative paths relative to the symlink's location rather than (like all other coreutils commands I know of) relative to the current directory. It seems to me it should be easy enough to alert users to this gotcha by printing a warning to stderr when creating a symlink whose location is an absolute path and whose target isn't. But not only doesn't that warning occur, but there isn't even an entry for it at https://www.pixelbeat.org/docs/coreutils-gotchas.html. This sort of thing seems to me to be a likely huge turnoff for non-technical people who might otherwise be using Linux on the desktop. Can we please implement this warning? Sincerely, Chris Hennick