[ale] Can LN Erase Data?

[Jeff Lightner]

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.

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-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
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