Symlink Size [was Rebase/Perl packaging problem?]

[Corinna Vinschen]

On Nov 27 18:27, Buchbinder, Barry (NIH/NIAID) [E] wrote:
> Barry Buchbinder sent the following at Tuesday, November 27, 2012 6:02 PM
> >For the record, I was worried that if I simply deleted it cygcheck -c
> >perl would report perl as incomplete.  So I changed the link so that it
> >pointed to </usr/bin/cygperl5_14.dll>.  cygcheck reports complete and the
> >rebaseall error message goes away.
> 
> This is just for my education.
> 
> While looking at this, I noticed (where "noticed" = "was confused and
> thought that something was wrong") that the ls showed the symlink to be 24
> bytes while Widows Explorer (properties) and cmd /c DIR showed it to be
> 35 bytes.  When I copied the symlink nothing changed.  When I removed the
> system attribute of the copy (making it no longer a symlink), ls started
> showing it as 35 bytes.
> 
> Looking inside the symlink in a windows text editor showed the following
> 35 byte string:  "!<symlink>/usr/bin/cygperl5_14.dll" (no trailing \n).
> "/usr/bin/cygperl5_14.dll" is 24 bytes so the numbers are explained.
> 
> So I'm wondering:  Is this by design (presumably to be consistent with
> POSIX or Linux)

Yes.  The size of a symlink is supposed to be the length of the path
the symlink is pointing to.

> or is it just the way it worked out?  (Or both?)  Are
> there other cygwin situations where ls doesn't report the actual size
> on disk?

Yes.  All dirs are given a size of 0 explicitely to circumvent a curious
behaviour of the NTFS driver, see comment in fhandler_disk_file.cc,
lines 527ff(*).  Special device entries, local sockets or named pipes
have a size of 0 even if the underlying file representing the device has
not.

(*) http://cygwin.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/src/winsup/cygwin/fhandler_disk_file.cc?rev=1.380&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup&cvsroot=src


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Project Co-Leader          cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat

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