How to Unlink a file in Hp-UX UNIX

[Becke]

I need to restore a filesystem in a particular directory, but before I actually restore that database filesystem, i need to delete the contents of that directory,

The problem is that there are several links in this directory which points to some other filesystems, how do i unlink these links before deleting the contents, so I can restore the filesystem.

Please advise how to unlink it, so when I blow the contents it won't actually blow other files...

what command is good to unlink the files without deleting their links files

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

These soft links are just files.

They can be deleted with the rm command.

If you need to re-establish after the work, then do an ll command on them so its easier to put them back together.

SEP

[harry d brown jr]

are they hard links or symbolic?

live free or die
harry d brown jr

[Geoff Wild]

rm

Example

cd ~gwild
ln -s /tmp mytmp
ls -l mytmp
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root sys 4 Apr 21 07:29 mytmp -> /tmp

rm mytmp
ls -ld /tmp
drwxrwxrwt 21 bin bin 8192 Apr 21 07:30 /tmp


Rgds...Geoff

[Suraj Singh_1]

I am sure u are talking of symbolic links as u mentioned that currently u have linked filesystems.

These could be two ways to achieve what you wish to do:
1. You can simply remove the link files (using rm), just have the names of these files backed up so that if you plan to create them again, you don't have any problems. [ ls -l|grep ^l ]

2. unmount the filesystems which are linked to the files you are mentioning. This would definitely ensure that you do not alter any data.

Rgds

[Becke]

Thanks Guys,

I have used unlink command to delete the links without acutally deleting the target files, which were linked.

Cheers