Can you change what a symlink points to after it is created?

unix symlink
Jonathan Leffler picture Jonathan Leffler · Sep 23, 2009 · Viewed 130.1k times · Source

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.

Answer

Taai picture Taai · Jul 2, 2012

Yes, you can!

$ ln -sfn source_file_or_directory_name softlink_name

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