symlink()
creates a symbolic link named
newpath
which contains the string
oldpath.
Symbolic links are interpreted at run time as if the contents of the
link had been substituted into the path being followed to find a file or
directory.
Symbolic links may contain
..
path components, which (if used at the start of the link) refer to the
parent directories of that in which the link resides.
A symbolic link (also known as a soft link) may point to an existing
file or to a nonexistent one; the latter case is known as a dangling
link.
The permissions of a symbolic link are irrelevant; the ownership is
ignored when following the link, but is checked when removal or
renaming of the link is requested and the link is in a directory with
the sticky bit
(S_ISVTX)
set.
If
newpath
exists it will
not
be overwritten.
RETURN VALUE
On success, zero is returned.
On error, -1 is returned, and
errno
is set appropriately.
ERRORS
EACCES
Write access to the directory containing
newpath
is denied, or one of the directories in the path prefix of
newpath
did not allow search permission.
(See also
path_resolution(7).)
EEXIST
newpath
already exists.
EFAULT
oldpath or newpath points outside your accessible address space.
EIO
An I/O error occurred.
ELOOP
Too many symbolic links were encountered in resolving
newpath.
ENAMETOOLONG
oldpath or newpath was too long.
ENOENT
A directory component in
newpath
does not exist or is a dangling symbolic link, or
oldpath
is the empty string.
ENOMEM
Insufficient kernel memory was available.
ENOSPC
The device containing the file has no room for the new directory
entry.
ENOTDIR
A component used as a directory in
newpath
is not, in fact, a directory.
EPERM
The file system containing
newpath
does not support the creation of symbolic links.
EROFS
newpath
is on a read-only file system.
CONFORMING TO
SVr4, 4.3BSD, POSIX.1-2001.
NOTES
No checking of
oldpath
is done.
Deleting the name referred to by a symlink will actually delete the
file (unless it also has other hard links).
If this behavior is not desired, use
link(2).
This page is part of release 3.14 of the Linux
man-pages
project.
A description of the project,
and information about reporting bugs,
can be found at
http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.
