ISS System Scanner Report

[Donald Kok]

What to do with the results? For Instance:

file-all-07 Symbolic link target is not an absolute path name

Description Is the target name for a symbolic link an absolute pathname?

Consequences The target name is relative to the directory, which may cause applications to reference an incorrect target.

Remedy Change all symbolic links such that the target name is an absolute pathname. Symbolic links may be created using the command ln -s file target.

/etc/vhelp/families/C/HPUX.hf
Target is ../../../../usr/lib/vhelp/hpux/C/HPUX.hf

There seems to be thousands of this links. I don't feel like linking these to the absolute path. I think the risk of a typo is bigger than the risk of moving these files.

What do you guru's think???

[Steven Sim Kok Leong]

Hi,

I personally don't think there is any cause for worry. A simple test does not show any weaknesses with relative links in symbolic links:

[root@xxx /]# ll a
ls: a: No such file or directory
[root@xxx /]# cat /tmp/a
echo test
[root@xxx /]# ll /tmp/test/a
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 Apr 17 19:01 /tmp/test/a -> ../a
[root@xxx /]# /tmp/test/a
test

As shown, executing /tmp/test/a from / does not cause /a to be executed. Instead, /tmp/a is still being executed. Thus, ../a is only relative to the source of the link, not your present working directory.

Hope this helps. Regards.

Steven Sim Kok Leong