How to change timestamp on symbolic link?

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Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell,comp.unix.solaris,comp.unix.programmer

Remove the symlink and then recreate it:

lchmod()
{
  if [ ! -h "$1" ]; then
     echo "$1 is not a symlink." >&2
     exit 1
  fi
  symlink=`ls -ld $1 | awk '{print $9}'`
  target=`ls -ld $1 | awk '{print $11}'`
  rm $1
  ln -s $target $symlink
}

How to change timestamp on symbolic link?

This won't work if either of the names contains whitespace.

You can do a little better by splitting on the ' -> ', but even that isn't reliable (consider "ln -s 'a -> b' c"). To make it robust you would have to resort to a C program or perl script (or anything else that can do a proper readlink() call).

Geoff Clare

documented on: 2001.03.21 Wed 16:37:52