This is the mail archive of the
cygwin
mailing list for the Cygwin project.
ln -s exe magic (coreutils 6.7-2)
- From: "Pierre A. Humblet" <Pierre dot Humblet at ieee dot org>
- To: <cygwin at cygwin dot com>
- Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2007 18:07:17 -0500
- Subject: ln -s exe magic (coreutils 6.7-2)
When a user runs exim-config, the following line is executed:
ln -s -f /usr/bin/exim /usr/sbin/sendmail
If later the user switches to ssmtp, ssmtp-config asks
(6) link /usr/sbin/sendmail to /usr/sbin/ssmtp?
Some programs (e.g. cron) expect /usr/sbin/sendmail to handle mail.
Currently it is a symbolic link to /usr/bin/exim.
Changing it to a link to ssmtp may affect other programs such as cron.
Do you want to link /usr/sbin/sendmail to /usr/sbin/ssmtp (y/N)? y
and it runs
ln -s -f /usr/sbin/ssmtp /usr/sbin/sendmail
At this point we have:
/usr/sbin: ls -l sendmail*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 p-humblet sw 13 Jan 23 17:40 sendmail -> /usr/bin/exim*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 p-humblet sw 19 Jan 23 17:29 sendmail.exe -> /usr/sbin/ssmtp.exe*
so that the commands "sendmail" and "sendmail.exe" produce different results,
cron keeps using exim and if exim is uninstalled then cron misbehaves.
My suggestion is that by default ln -s should not do any magic. If some magic is
desired, users can define an alias or shell function that adds --enable-exe-magic
Pierre
--
Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/