symlink of /home causes mail delivery failure
Gordon Messmer
yinyang at eburg.com
Thu Oct 11 21:53:26 UTC 2007
Steve Siegfried wrote:
> Dr. Michael J. Chudobiak wrote:
>
>> Is there any reason that procmail (or anything else) would fail if /home
>> is a symlink?
>>
> It depends on:
>
> - What shell you're using: When presented with a directory symlink like
> "/home/A -> /tmp/A", environment variable HOME defined as "/home/A",
> and the command "cd $HOME", some shells (sh for example) won't update
> the cwd variable when they get there. Thus the shell (sh in this
> example) will yield funny results:
> # cd $HOME
> # echo $PWD
> /home/A
> # pwd
> /home/A
> # /bin/pwd
> /tmp/a
>
Why would that matter? /home/A/Inbox and /tmp/A/Inbox will still be the
same file, so this shouldn't actually create a problem.
> - The type of symlink reference you've used. "/home/A -> /tmp/A"
> will normally cause less trouble than "/home/A -> ../../tmp/A".
>
That is precisely wrong. Using relative paths (which would be ../tmp/A,
not ../../tmp/A) will be less problematic. When your system is mounted
in a different location by a rescue CD, for instance, relative paths
will work properly, but absolute paths will not.
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