Does rm -rf follow symbolic links?
Problem
I have a directory like this: And I want to remove it using . However I'm scared will follow the symlink and delete everything in that directory (which is very bad). I can't find anything about this in the man pages. What would be the exact behavior of running from a directory above this one?
Error Output
$ ls -l total 899166 drwxr-xr-x 12 me scicomp 324 Jan 24 13:47 data -rw-r--r-- 1 me scicomp 84188 Jan 24 13:47 lod-thin-1.000000-0.010000-0.030000.rda drwxr-xr-x 2 me scicomp 808 Jan 24 13:47 log lrwxrwxrwx 1 me scicomp 17 Jan 25 09:41 msg -> /home/me/msg
Unverified for your environment
Select your OS to check compatibility.
1 Fix
Fix for: Does rm -rf follow symbolic links?
Example 1: Deleting a directory containing a soft link to another directory. So, we see that the target of the soft-link survives. Example 2: Deleting a soft link to a directory Only, the soft link is deleted. The target of the soft-link survives. Example 3: Attempting to delete the target of a soft-link The file in the target of the symbolic link does not survive. The above experiments were done on a Debian GNU/Linux 9.0 (stretch) system.
Awaiting Verification
Be the first to verify this fix
Sign in to verify this fix