On 03/04/2011 11:05, Jilles Tjoelker wrote:
On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 11:15:39AM -0600, Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:
I had a little script that would remove broken links. I used to do it
like this:
if ! stat -L $link> /dev/null; then rm $link; fi
But recently (some time in February according to the CVS records) stat
was changed so that stat -L would use lstat(2) if the link is broken.
So I had to change it to
if stat -L $link | awk '{print $3}' | grep l> /dev/null;
then rm $link; fi
but it is a lot less elegant.
What is the proper accepted way to remove broken links?
A better answer to your original question was already given, but for
that command, isn't it sufficient to do
if ! [ -e $link ]; then rm $link; fi
All test(1)'s primaries that test things about files follow symlinks,
except for -h/-L.
I'd do '[ -e "$link" ] || unlink $link' but Jilles is definitely right
that simply using 'test -e' is the way to go.
Stephen, sorry to hear that the change in behavior to stat(1) was
troubling to you. A little bit of the history might be useful. I
originally imported stat(1) from NetBSD in 2002, but did not keep up
with the improvements that NetBSD made to it. I recently found time to
catch up with the work that they've done, and the change to the behavior
of readlink seemed like a useful one so I brought it over. hopefully it
won't cause too many more problems. :)
Doug
--
Nothin' ever doesn't change, but nothin' changes much.
-- OK Go
Breadth of IT experience, and depth of knowledge in the DNS.
Yours for the right price. :) http://SupersetSolutions.com/
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