Behaviour of soft links pointing to each other in unix filesystem? [closed] - linux

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When I made two soft links in a directory pointing to each other
eg.
abc->xyz and xyz->abc
I was not able to open that directory graphically in ubuntu.
When I clicked that dierctory it instantly opened and that gets closed immediately.
what may be the reason for that and how can it be sorted except deleting those soft links?

You probably mean circular symbolic links (or symlinks). What would you expect? Any open(2) (or others) syscall would fail with errno set to
ELOOP Too many symbolic links encountered while traversing the path.
You should remove one of the links, with the unlink(2) syscall, e.g. called by the rm command; so you could open a terminal, cd to the directory containing that mess, then
rm -v abc xyz

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Can using cp command corrupt files transferred across different filesystems? Should I be using something like rsync instead? [closed]

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I am trying to copy files from one hard drive to another in my home server using the cp command. I am copying from an NTFS-formatted partition to an ext4 partition on a new hard drive I have installed.
Is it possible for the cp command to corrupt the transferred files?
Should I be using something like rsycn to verify file integrity is checked upon completion instead?
I would use rsync.
rsync can give you additional checksums, but the real power is the ability to resume after interruptions. This really helps for large files like VMs.
This really is more a serverfault question - See copying-a-large-directory-tree-locally-cp-or-rsync.
rsync should be better than cp when copying files.

What are circular symlinks in Unix-like systems used for? [closed]

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I was browsing a directory on a Linux machine, and when doing a detailed listing I noticed that a link is pointing to itself, for example:
somelink -> /path/to/directory/somelink
I am wondering what is the reason for doing such a thing?
If the somelink is in /path/to/directory then this is an invalid symlink. If you try to access it, the filesystem will give you an error (probably something like too many levels of symbolic links*). It could have been a typo (or some other mistake) when it was created, or the symlink got moved somehow and ended up linking to itself.
There's no good reason for a circular symlink. Most probably, it was created by accident.

What is up with Linux and Apache's ".d"? [closed]

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Linux and Apache suffix a bunch of files and folders with d or .d.
init.d
rc.d
/etc/httpd/conf.d
/etc/httpd/vhost.d
What is the meaning of this convention?
It means simply "directory" and commonly indicates that either a single file, or a directory full of them is acceptable for configuration.
(In the case of rc.d, that replaces the old-style Unix /etc/rc script which is no longer used on Linux.)
Means "a directory", containing a bunch of files intended for the same goal (init scripts in init.d, configuration files in conf.d, etc.) - this tendency seems to have expanded onto separate files, too.

Where should I place a download tarball? [closed]

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I downloaded ChromePlus tarball and extracted it to my home directory. The extracted folder contains an executable that I can double-click to launch ChromePlus. So I assume I do not need to any extra things to install it.
I'm new to Linux. Where should I place ChromePlus directory? It's currently sitting on my home directory and it does not look neat. After googling, I thought about /bin/, /usr/bin, /usr/lib. Where is the best place?
I usually do so. I put the extracted directory to /usr/local and make a link to the binary in /usr/local/bin, so it looks something like:
/usr/local/bin/theapp -> /usr/local/Theapp/bin/theapp
If I care about upgrading Theapp and the extracted directory contains version then I also symlink "Theapp" to point to current version of it, e. g.:
/usr/local/Theapp -> /usr/local/Theapp-1.0.0
Since /usr/local may not be writable on some systems that you have access to, one's home directory is often the only place. For things like compiling the Linux kernel source code, using /usr/src, a path outside a home dir, is even discouraged.

Use of /etc/passwd-, /etc/shadow-, /etc/group- [closed]

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In addition to the files : /etc/group, /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow, I could see three files in my linux machine.
/etc/group-
/etc/passwd-
/etc/shadow-
I cannot see these files in my root filesystem. But when I try to add one user using useradd command, these files seem to get generated.
So i would like to know when exactly is these files created and what is the use of these files?
These are backups of previous versions.
Manual pages show these files and states:
/etc/passwd-
Backup file for /etc/passwd.
/etc/shadow-
Backup file for /etc/shadow.
Note that this file is used by the tools of the shadow toolsuite, but not by all user and password management tools.
See http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/oneiric/man5/shadow.5.html and http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/oneiric/man5/passwd.5.html

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