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Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2007 18:07:17 -0500
From: "Pierre A. Humblet" <Pierre DOT Humblet AT ieee DOT org>
Subject: ln -s exe magic (coreutils 6.7-2)
To: <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
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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


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