Re: [PLUG] Symlink Problem

[Thomas Delrue <delrue.thomas@gmail.com>]

On 12/14/2016 02:52 PM, Casey Bralla wrote:
> I executed: "ln -s "/files/document /docs" to create the symlink.
> But when I do a listing of "/docs", I get this:
> 
> #ls -lap /docs total 8 drwxr-xr-x  2 root root 4096 Dec 14 14:44 ./ 
> drwxr-xr-x 29 root root 4096 Dec 14 14:43 ../ lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root
> 15 Dec 14 14:44 document -> /files/document
> 
> If I list the "/docs/document" directory, I get all my documents
> listed as I expected.
> 
> Can somebody explain to me what I'm doing wrong?   It all seems so
> simple, but I'm screwing it up somehow.

yes, everything is working as expected.
when you do (I use -hal but your -lap works similarly):

$> ls -hal /docs
What you are asking is: shows me the info for the entry "/docs".
This happens to be a 'file' (special one at that - it's a symlink) and
not a directory so you can think of this being the same question as:
$> ls -hal /path/somefile.txt

When you do that, it just shows you the info for /path/somefile.txt
So ls is doing exactly what you are asking it (I'll stop yelling RTFM
now, I promise)

Instead, you want to descend into /docs, so what you really want to ask
ls to do is this:

$> ls -hal /docs/
(did you notice the trailing / ???)

That will make it descend into it and show you the content of /docs/
instead of the entry for docs...

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