Note: This bug is displayed in read-only format because the product is no longer active in Red Hat Bugzilla.

RHEL Engineering is moving the tracking of its product development work on RHEL 6 through RHEL 9 to Red Hat Jira (issues.redhat.com). If you're a Red Hat customer, please continue to file support cases via the Red Hat customer portal. If you're not, please head to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira and file new tickets here. Individual Bugzilla bugs in the statuses "NEW", "ASSIGNED", and "POST" are being migrated throughout September 2023. Bugs of Red Hat partners with an assigned Engineering Partner Manager (EPM) are migrated in late September as per pre-agreed dates. Bugs against components "kernel", "kernel-rt", and "kpatch" are only migrated if still in "NEW" or "ASSIGNED". If you cannot log in to RH Jira, please consult article #7032570. That failing, please send an e-mail to the RH Jira admins at rh-issues@redhat.com to troubleshoot your issue as a user management inquiry. The email creates a ServiceNow ticket with Red Hat. Individual Bugzilla bugs that are migrated will be moved to status "CLOSED", resolution "MIGRATED", and set with "MigratedToJIRA" in "Keywords". The link to the successor Jira issue will be found under "Links", have a little "two-footprint" icon next to it, and direct you to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira (issue links are of type "https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-XXXX", where "X" is a digit). This same link will be available in a blue banner at the top of the page informing you that that bug has been migrated.

Description of problem:

The Red Hat version of Apache httpd package includes a symlink in /etc that points to the logs directory in /var:

# ls -l /etc/httpd/logs
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 19 Jan  3  2011 /etc/httpd/logs -> ../../var/log/httpd

This symlink should not be there for several reasons:

1. Has little usefulness (the admin should know that logs lie in /var and go there directly - I've personally never navigated to http logs through this /etc symlink, while I've administered Apache HTTPD for several years on RH distros)
2. It causes a diffusion of responsibility between /etc and /var
3. Most of all, it messes up recursive greps in /etc because grep traverses the symlink and starts to search through (often massive) https logs, taking lots of time and generating unneeded matches. Unfortunately, there's no option in GNU grep to make it not traverse symlinks.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
httpd-2.2.15-5.el6.x86_64

How reproducible:

Just look for the link or try grepping recursively in /etc:

# ls -l /etc/httpd/logs

# grep -ir http /etc/

Thanks for the report.

The default (and many custom) configurations rely on this symlink, since the server root is /etc/httpd, allowing filenames such as "logs/blah" to be used as relative log file locations.  We have no plans to change this.

If the real issue you face is with recursive grep, I suggest you file an RFE against grep; a new option symilar to --devices could be added to avoid symlinks, possibly.   Simply using an appropriate --exclude/--exclude-dir is an option as well, of course.