Re: ln -sf foo symlink_to_directory

[Paul Eggert]

address@hidden (Paul Jarc) writes:

> I think a new option would be useful - I'll call it --syntactic, but
> that may not be a good name.  --syntactic means that the filenames
> passed to link() or symlink() (or rename() or open(), as this would
> also be useful for mv & cp) are computed entirely from the
> command-line parameters, without checking to see what happens to exist
> in the filesystem.

Nice suggestion; I've wanted that in the past.

Perhaps "--as-is" rather than "--syntactic"?

There is some overlap here, as
"ln --as-is foo bar" would be equivalent to "link foo bar",
"rm --as-is foo" would be equivalent to "unlink foo", and
"cp --as-is foo bar" would be equivalent to "cat <foo >bar".
So the only new capabilities would be provided by "ln -s --as-is"
and "mv --as-is".

This suggests that another possibility might be to add an "-s" option
to the "link" command, and to have a new "rename" command.  But I tend
to prefer adding a flag to the existing commands.

But I prefer Bruno's suggestion of adding a flag to the existing commands.