X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2007 18:07:17 -0500 From: "Pierre A. Humblet" Subject: ln -s exe magic (coreutils 6.7-2) To: Message-id: <011701c73f43$3d07d270$3e0010ac@wirelessworld.airvananet.com> MIME-version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2900.2869 Content-type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT cygwin DOT com; run by ezmlm List-Id: List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner AT cygwin DOT com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT cygwin DOT com 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/