From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040312 Description of problem: I cannot unlink symlinks to directories using rm -f, rm -rf or just plain rm. For example: mkdir ~/k cd ~/k ln -s / foo rm foo/ rm: cannot remove directory `foo/': Is a directory rm -f foo/ rm: cannot remove `foo/': Not a directory rm -rf foo/ rm: cannot remove `foo/': Not a directory rm -r foo/ rm: descend into write-protected directory `foo/'? [n] (answering no, rm exits and foo is not removed) rm -r foo rm: descend into write-protected directory `foo/'? [y] rm: descend into write-protected directory `foo//sys'? ... Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): coreutils-5.2.1-3 How reproducible: Always Actual Results: rm doesn't unlink symlinks to directories Expected Results: rm should unlink symlinks to directories without trying to descend them. Additional info: The same problem exists on Fedora Core 1 with coreutils-5.0-34.1. The problem is not present on Red Hat Linux 9 with coreutils-4.5.3-19.0.2.
[tim@cyberelk k]$ ln -s / foo; rm foo [tim@cyberelk k]$ ln -s / foo; rm -f foo [tim@cyberelk k]$ ln -s / foo; rm -rf foo [tim@cyberelk k]$ ln -s / foo; rm -f foo [tim@cyberelk k]$ ln -s / foo; rm -r foo [tim@cyberelk k]$ rpm -q coreutils coreutils-5.2.1-3 'foo' != 'foo/' -- you are forcing the dereference yourself by adding '/'.