Problem with ls -L and a question concerning recursion

[karu]

Hello!

I'm new to Linux and I'm trying to get some little scripts working (Kornshell).

First of all, I have a problem with ls -L. In my opinion, this command should return some information about the file a given softlink refers to. But that doesn't work.

My test run:

Home Directory: contains a file named file1 and a directory, named directory1.

1. I created a soflink in the same directory with ln -s file1 file2
2. I created a softlink in the subdir (directory1) with ln -s file1 directory1/file2
3. ls -L file2 in the home dir returns only the name "file2".
4. cd directory1; ls -L file2 returns something like "ls: cannot access file2: No such file or directory"

What is going wrong?

Outstanding: SSH shows several colours per file.
File1 is green (like all normal files), File2 is turquoise and directory1/file2 is red/orange on a black background ?!


My second problem is this script which should walk through directories, recursive.

#!/usr/bin/ksh

function walk_recursive
{
typeset list=$(ls $1)

for k in $list
do
        path=$1/$k

        if test -d $path
        then
                print "found dir: $path"
                walk_recursive $path
        fi

        if test -f $path
        then
                print "found file: $path"
        fi
done
}

All in all, it works. But: in a subdirectory, the last file is shown twice. Example: i take the directory-structure from above and i get:

found file: /xxx/bash/file1
found file: /xxx/bash/file2
found dir: /xxx/bash/directory1/
found file: /xxx/bash/directory1/file2
found file: /xxx/bash/directory1/file2


When i add a new file to the subdirectory, it is:

found file: /xxx/bash/file1
found file: /xxx/bash/file2
found dir: /xxx/bash/directory1/
found file: /xxx/bash/directory1/file2
found file: /xxx/bash/directory1/file3
found file: /xxx/bash/directory1/file3

Why?



Sorry for my bad english.
Thank you!

[Cabhan]

So your "ls" problems. "ls -L" only affects file information, not the file name. So you need to print out the long listing:

ls -lL file2

This will print out the name "file2", but the permissions, size, etc. of file1.

For the subdirectory link, "ln -s <target> <link>" creates <link> that links to exactly the file <target>. So if you run the command:

ln -s file1 directory/file2

Then a link "file2" is created in the subdirectory for a file called "file1" THAT ALSO EXISTS IN THE SUBDIRECTORY. This is why you should always use absolute paths for the target of a symbolic link.

I'm not sure about the scripting problem: I will think about this a bit.