[ale] Can LN Erase Data?

Jeff Lightner jlightner at water.com
Sun Dec 21 09:05:01 EST 2008


Jim has most of it.

 

Just wanted to mention the initial "ln" without a "-s" would have failed
completely because hard links can only exist within a filesystem as they
reference the same inode.   One of the reasons for symbolic links (the
"-s" option) was to get around this limitation.  It is unlikely your
first ln command caused any issue.  What Jim writes about the second
command is more likely the cause.

 

________________________________

From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Jim
Kinney
Sent: Sunday, December 21, 2008 8:39 AM
To: ale at ale.org
Subject: Re: [ale] Can LN Erase Data?

 


Fresh install of F10 creates a download, documents and Music folder. So
if you linked some other folder to the existing Documents, the existing
contents are now hidden but not deleted. 
So you now have /media/DATA/Documents obscuring your view of the
original /home/marc/Documents.

But a third read (before coffee) suggests you were trying to link FROM
the /hom/marc TO /media/DATA

you got the ln command params backwards. It should be ln <source> <link
dest>.

So unlink the mess you have (man unlink) and ln ~/Documents /media/DATA/
, etc.




2008/12/20 Marc Ferguson <marcferguson at gmail.com>

Hi,

I would like to know if the "ln" command can erase data?  I did a fresh
install of Fedora 10 and I wanted to link my "download", "documents",
"music", etc folders in my /home directory to my second partition.  I
forgot about symbolic links and I did this first:

$ ln /media/DATA/Documents /home/marc/

It gave me a particular message, I forget what it was... it didn't seem
threatening at the time.  I saw that it didn't work so I did the
symbolic link and that worked fine.

$ ln -s /media/DATA/Documents /home/marc

So; that worked, but when I opened the documents folder all the files in
there were gone.  Did I do something wrong?

-- 
Marc F.

"..Grace to you and peace from Him who is and who was and who is to
come.." -Rev1:4
"When life gives me lemons... I make Linuxaide!" -Marc F.

_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
Ale at ale.org
http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale




-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
----------------------------------
CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This e-mail may contain privileged or confidential information and is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s). If you are not the intended recipient, any disclosure, copying, distribution, or use of the contents of this information is prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this electronic transmission in error, please reply immediately to the sender that you have received the message in error, and delete it. Thank you.
----------------------------------
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20081221/574e4d48/attachment-0001.html 


More information about the Ale mailing list