Re: How to make the colors different for a symbol link pointing to a file and symbol link pointing to a dir?

[Chris Jones]

On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 07:28:05AM EST, Eric Blake wrote:
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> According to Chris Jones on 12/30/2009 11:26 PM:
> > But pardon my ignorance, where exactly do you specify "LINK target"?
> 
> In the source file that you feed to dircolors, so that dircolors can
> generate the appropriate $LS_COLORS setting in your environment.  Some
> distros provide ~/.dir_colors which will be automatically used as the file
> fed to dircolors during something like /etc/login, the default ~/.bashrc,
> or other startup file, although that starts to get into distro specifics.

Ah, OK.. I had missed the dircolors command's -p switch.

So I added the "LINK target" statement to my custom ~/.dircolors, and
caused $LS_COLORS to be regenerated in a separate bash instance, and now
I am getting this:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
$ ls -alh -F --full-time --color=always

drwxr-xr-x  7 user user 4.0K 2009-12-31  [..]  -0500 ./
drwxrwxrwt 27 root root  12K 2009-12-31  [..]  -0500 ../
drwxr-xr-x  2 user user 4.0K 2009-12-31  [..]  -0500 d1/
-rw-r--r--  1 user user    0 2009-12-31  [..]  -0500 f1
lrwxrwxrwx  1 user user    3 2009-12-31  [..]  -0500 argetmld1: -> d1:
lrwxrwxrwx  1 user user    2 2009-12-31  [..]  -0500 lf1 -> f1
------------------------------------------------------------------------

The 'ld1' soft link to directory 'd1' is prefixed by 'argetm'.

Also both of the soft links are now white on black instead of the
expected colors.

Now where it gets really weird, is that I had recreated my test target
directory /tmp/ldir, presumably after enabling 'LINK target' and when I
revert to a shell where $LS_COLORS was gen'd without enabling 'LINK
target', I have the following:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
$ ls -alh -F --full-time --color=always

drwxr-xr-x  7 user user 4.0K 2009-12-31  [..]  -0500 ./
drwxrwxrwt 27 root root  12K 2009-12-31  [..]  -0500 ../
drwxr-xr-x  2 user user 4.0K 2009-12-31  [..]  -0500 d1/
-rw-r--r--  1 user user    0 2009-12-31  [..]  -0500 f1
lrwxrwxrwx  1 user user    3 2009-12-31  [..]  -0500 ld1: -> d1:
lrwxrwxrwx  1 user user    2 2009-12-31  [..]  -0500 lf1 -> f1
------------------------------------------------------------------------

The 'ld1' soft link that I created is now listed as 'ld1:' with an
appended colon (:) and it links to directory 'd1:' instead of 'd1'.

Also, the '/' indicator is no longer appended to 'ld1 -> d1'.

I proceeded to issue a 'file' command and this is the report:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
d1:   directory
f1:   empty
ld1:: broken symbolic link to `d1:'
lf1:  symbolic link to `f1'
------------------------------------------------------------------------

.. which makes sense, since my test directory's file name is 'd1'.

Other commands such as rm, etc. require that I use the ld1: name in
order to recognized the soft link - 'rm ld1' comes back with 'No such
file or directory' message as (not) expected.

Not that this unduly bothers me but I'm curious and I thought I should
report it.

This is a debian 'lenny' system, with per 'dpkg -l' the following
installed:

bash          3.2-4                        The GNU Bourne Again SHell
coreutils     6.10-6                       The GNU core utilities

Attaching my ~/.dircolors custom file to this message just in case.

Thank you for your comments.

CJ

.dircolors
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