On Dec 8, 2024, at 16:16, Stephen Morris <steve.morris...@gmail.com> wrote: > > >> On 7/12/24 17:09, Samuel Sieb wrote: >> On 12/6/24 7:14 PM, Stephen Morris wrote: >>>> On 7/12/24 13:28, Samuel Sieb wrote: >>>> There's nothing accumulating here. The lock file is checked at >>>> application startup. If it's still valid, then the new process will not >>>> start, probably passing information to the existing process. If it's not >>>> valid, then the old lock is deleted and a new one created. Standard >>>> practice, just using a symlink instead of a file. >>> >>> What determines that the lock file is valid? In the case of Thunderbird >>> where it creates a lock file in folder for my profile and the folder where >>> Thunderbird is installed to, the symlinks are dangling while Thunderbird is >>> running, if firefox is the same while firefox is running the lock symlink >>> is dangling and after firefox shuts down it is left there dangling, hence >>> what determines whether or not it is valid? >> >> It's not actually a link, so it's not "dangling". It's just information. >> The information is an IP address and a process id. I'm not sure how the IP >> address is used, but the process id is how it knows if it's valid. If the >> process exists, it's valid. > > I'm referring to it as dangling because when you run "sudo symlinks -r | grep > -i dangling", which is the documented method for determining "dangling" > symlinks, reports those links as "dangling". My assumption is the definition > of a "dangling" symlink is a link that points to an entity that doesn't > exist. I've have also seen Fedora documentation in the past that refers to > those sorts of symlinks as "broken".
Sure, if a package is supposed to use a symlink in /usr/bin to point at an executable in /usr/libexec/foo/, then, yeah it’s broken, but as you have aptly demonstrated, not all dangling symlinks represent something broken. They’re just another way that people abuse filesystem data as a data structure. Deleting dangling symlinks haphazardly is not a solution, you need to use the package database and understand what is supposed to exist before blithely deleting the symlink. This is why I suggested that the tool wasn’t appropriate when used on all the filesystem. -- Jonathan Billings -- _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to users-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
