Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 76954
rm fails to remove symbolic links
Last modified: 2005-10-31 17:00:50 EST
Description of Problem: The rm command will not remove symlinks properly. Behavior is different on ext2 and ext3 filesystems, but broken both places. On ext2, symlinks may not be removed at all. On ext3, symlinks to directories may not be removed. Worked fine in 7.3 with fileutils-4.1-10. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): fileutils-4.1.9-11 Steps to Reproduce: 1. touch testfile; ln -s testfile linkfile 2. touch testdir; ln -s testdir linkdir 3. rm linkfile linkdir Actual Results: rm: cannot remove `linkfile/': Not a directory. rm: cannot remove `linkdir/': Not a directory. Expected Results: The symlinks "linkfile" and "linkdir" should be deleted. The file "testfile" and directory "testdir" should still exist.
First of all, you probably mistyped mkdir with touch in the second step, since touch does not create directories, afaik. Secondly, you try to remove the file like a directory, i.e. with a slash at the end. This gives the first error. Thirdly, since your linkdir is actually a file and not a directory, you get the same error as above. I have tried to reproduce the problem you are describing, and could not. rm works fine for me. :)