From owner-freebsd-hackers  Sat Feb  3 12:46:58 2001
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X-Posted-By: GJB-Post 2.11 18-Jan-2001
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Date: Sun, 04 Feb 2001 06:46:32 +1000
From: Greg Black <gjb@gbch.net>
To: hackers@freebsd.org
Subject: Trailing slashes and rmdir - POLA broken
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Observe the following:

    $ uname -rs
    FreeBSD 4.1-RELEASE
    $ ls -l
    $ mkdir foo
    $ ln -s foo bar
    $ rmdir bar
    rmdir: bar: Not a directory

So far, so good -- but look at this:

    $ rmdir bar/
    $ ls -l
    total 0
    lrwxrwx---  1 gjb  wheel  3 Feb  4 06:35 bar -> foo
    $ 

Oops, "rmdir bar/" ended up as "rmdir foo" and left the useless
symlink bar in place.

BSD/OS gives that silly "Is a directory" error message for the
"rmdir bar/" case, but at least it does not actually do anything.

I don't think FreeBSD should do what it does.  Is there any good
reason to preserve this behaviour?


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