Symbolic links

[fanf]

What happens if you try to create a symlink to a zero-length target, as in ln -s "" foo?

Linux: ENOENT.

Mac OS X 10.4: EINVAL.

FreeBSD: works, and any attempt to resolve the symlink returns ENOENT.

Solaris: works, and the resulting symlink behaves the same as ln -s . foo

Comments

[filecoreinuse.livejournal.com]

Does POSIX have a view on this?

[fanf]

I think the relevant sentence is:

The string pointed to by [the first argument] shall be treated only as a character string and shall not be validated as a pathname.

Which implies that FreeBSD and Solaris are correct to create the symlink and the others do not conform to POSIX. The pathname resolution algorithm explains how to interpret symlinks, and it is described in terms of string concatenation in a way that agrees with Solaris not FreeBSD. On the other hand my intuition agrees with FreeBSD.