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I made a symbolic link with the following commmand:

ln -s ../test5

I want to remove it now but my rm fails:

$ rm -Rf test5/
rm: cannot remove `test5/': Not a directory
$ rm test5/
rm: cannot remove directory `test5/': Is a directory
$ rmdir test5/
rmdir: test5/: Not a directory
$rm -r test5/
rm: cannot remove `test5/': Not a directory

$ls -l
 0 lrwxrwxrwx  1 peter peter    8 Jul 20 15:30 test5 -> ../test5/

How can I remove my symbolic link? (Ubuntu 8.10, bash)

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4 Answers

up vote 50 down vote accepted

Remove the trailing slash:

With prompt:

$ rm test5

Without prompt:

$ rm -f test5

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Try rm test5
(without the training slash).

The slash indicates that 'test5' is a direactory whereas it's actually a file linking to a directory.

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You can run removing the trailing slash:

$ rm test5

This will remove the file (i.e. the symlink).

Alternatively you may use unlink:

$ unlink test5

Again you must omit the trailing slash since you are attempting to unlink the symlink not the directory.

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Why the -Rf ? –  Arjan Jul 20 '09 at 13:14
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I feel silly asking, but have you tried rm -r? Since it's a symbolic link it shouldn't delete the target.

Edit: Just tried it, it's correct

Edit 2: rmdir says in its first line of the man page it deletes empty directories. I would think because it's a link it had the directory bit checked on its file properties, but because rmdir doesn't suspect that being the case it spits errors. Just use rm -r

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This will ask me to delete the files in the directory, that's not what I want, I want to delete only the link –  Peter Smit Jul 20 '09 at 12:46
The asking was because interactive was defined in my .profile. Added the response to rm -r. It still doesn't work. –  Peter Smit Jul 20 '09 at 12:50
You left the trailing '/' that's why it failed –  bobby Jul 20 '09 at 12:52
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