Does any operating system provide a mechanism (system call — not command line program) to change the pathname referenced by a symbolic link (symlink) — other than by unlinking the old one and creating a new one?
The POSIX standard does not. Solaris 10 does not. MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard) does not. (I'm tolerably certain neither AIX nor HP-UX does either. Judging from this list of Linux system calls, Linux does not have such a system call either.)
Is there anything that does?
(I'm expecting that the answer is "No".)
Since proving a negative is hard, let's reorganize the question.
If you know that some (Unix-like) operating system not already listed has no system call for rewriting the value of a symlink (the string returned by readlink()) without removing the old symlink and creating a new one, please add it — or them — in an answer.
Just in case it helps: there is a way to edit a symlink with midnight commander (mc). The menu command is (in French on my mc interface):
Fichier / Éditer le lien symbolique
which may be translated to:
File / Edit symbolic link
The shortcut is C-x C-s
Maybe it internally uses the ln --force command, I don't know.
Now, I'm trying to find a way to edit a whole lot of symlinks at once (that's how I arrived here).
Just a warning to the correct answers above:
Using the -f / --force Method provides a risk to lose the file if you mix up source and target:
mbucher@server2:~/test$ ls -la
total 11448
drwxr-xr-x 2 mbucher www-data 4096 May 25 15:27 .
drwxr-xr-x 18 mbucher www-data 4096 May 25 15:13 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 mbucher www-data 4109466 May 25 15:26 data.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 mbucher www-data 7582480 May 25 15:27 otherdata.tar.gz
lrwxrwxrwx 1 mbucher www-data 11 May 25 15:26 thesymlink -> data.tar.gz
mbucher@server2:~/test$
mbucher@server2:~/test$ ln -s -f thesymlink otherdata.tar.gz
mbucher@server2:~/test$
mbucher@server2:~/test$ ls -la
total 4028
drwxr-xr-x 2 mbucher www-data 4096 May 25 15:28 .
drwxr-xr-x 18 mbucher www-data 4096 May 25 15:13 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 mbucher www-data 4109466 May 25 15:26 data.tar.gz
lrwxrwxrwx 1 mbucher www-data 10 May 25 15:28 otherdata.tar.gz -> thesymlink
lrwxrwxrwx 1 mbucher www-data 11 May 25 15:26 thesymlink -> data.tar.gz
Of course this is intended, but usually mistakes occur. So, deleting and rebuilding the symlink is a bit more work but also a bit saver:
mbucher@server2:~/test$ rm thesymlink && ln -s thesymlink otherdata.tar.gz
ln: creating symbolic link `otherdata.tar.gz': File exists
which at least keeps my file.
Technically, there's no built-in command to edit an existing symbolic link. It can be easily achieved with a few short commands.
Here's a little bash/zsh function I wrote to update an existing symbolic link:
# -----------------------------------------
# Edit an existing symbolic link
#
# @1 = Name of symbolic link to edit
# @2 = Full destination path to update existing symlink with
# -----------------------------------------
function edit-symlink () {
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
echo "Name of symbolic link you would like to edit:"
read LINK
else
LINK="$1"
fi
LINKTMP="$LINK-tmp"
if [ -z "$2" ]; then
echo "Full destination path to update existing symlink with:"
read DEST
else
DEST="$2"
fi
ln -s $DEST $LINKTMP
rm $LINK
mv $LINKTMP $LINK
printf "Updated $LINK to point to new destination -> $DEST"
}
Wouldn't unlinking it and creating the new one do the same thing in the end anyway?
Yes, you can!
$ ln -sfn source_file_or_directory_name softlink_name
It is not necessary to explicitly unlink the old symlink. You can do this:
ln -s newtarget temp
mv temp mylink
(or use the equivalent symlink and rename calls). This is better than explicitly unlinking because rename is atomic, so you can be assured that the link will always point to either the old or new target. However this will not reuse the original inode.
On some filesystems, the target of the symlink is stored in the inode itself (in place of the block list) if it is short enough; this is determined at the time it is created.
Regarding the assertion that the actual owner and group are immaterial, symlink(7) on Linux says that there is a case where it is significant:
The owner and group of an existing symbolic link can be changed using lchown(2). The only time that the ownership of a symbolic link matters is when the link is being removed or renamed in a directory that has the sticky bit set (see stat(2)).
The last access and last modification timestamps of a symbolic link can be changed using utimensat(2) or lutimes(3).
On Linux, the permissions of a symbolic link are not used in any operations; the permissions are always 0777 (read, write, and execute for all user categories), and can't be changed.
Source: Stackoverflow.com