Symbolic Links

[pbird42]

Hi everyone,

Quick question about symbolic links. Symbolic links are always created with permissions of 777. Do these permissions, particularly the world read/write/execute, allow anyone to do anything to the symbolic link (such as change what the symbolic link points to) or are these permissions irrelevant and ignored by the system?

 

[sjm2]

Not 100% sure but since anything you want to do involves opening the symbolic link as a file, and the system calls to open the symbolic link as a file will follow the symbolic link and try to open the target, then it's really hard to edit the actual symbolic link.

 

[p5wizard]

The permissions on a symlink have no meaning whatsoever. It's the permissions of what is eventually pointed to (and that could be some levels of symlinks deep) that matters.

So everyone is allowed to (try to) follow the links but some other permission might hinder that operation...


HTH,

p5wizard

 

[pbird42]

Thanks for the info, that does help.

What about changing what the link points to? Can this only be done by the owner of the symbolic link by deleting the link and recreating it to point to a different file?

 

[p5wizard]

That I don't know off hand. Try it and see what happens? I am not at an AIX machine right now.

HTH,

p5wizard