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

[hoiho.livejournal.com]

Cygwin (on XP): ln: creating symbolic link `foo' to `': No such file or directory

NetBSD: As FreeBSD

[filecoreinuse.livejournal.com]

Does POSIX have a view on this?

[crazyscot.livejournal.com]

OSX 10.3.9 - same as 10.4

[filecoreinuse.livejournal.com]

Briefly looking at the symlink syscall in Linux at http://lxr.linux.no/linux+v2.6.26.5/fs/namei.c#L2447 it appears that the 'Right Thing' is done in that the first path is just passed 'as is' to the VFS layer meaning buggy behaviour can be blamed on the FS driver. This all assumes that GNU's libc doesn't 'sanitise' the input.

[zkzkz.livejournal.com]

Huh, fascinating. My intuition led me to expect Solaris's behaviour.