I ran into the following and still do not understand entirely the rationale behind this. If someone could explain why things are as they are I'd be thankful.

The following was tested on AIX 7.1 with ksh88, but i suspect that to be ubiquitous. In an installation routine i had to create a set of symbolic links. Because they might already exist i used test -e filename to test it:

Code:

if [ ! -e /some/link ] ; then
     ln -s /path/to/file /some/link
fi

This didn't work as expected because test returned 0 only if the link AND its target existed. If only the link exists but not the file referenced by it test will return 1.

The POSIX Documentation about test says:

Code:

-e  pathname
    True if pathname resolves to a file that exists. False if pathname cannot be resolved.

A "file that exists" is IMHO covered by a link, even if this link points to a file which doesn't. I can stat() this file and do many other operations on it which can be done with a file.

I do understand that i can use "-L", which tests for a link but i would like to understand the rationale behind the behavior. Or is the POSIX documentation inconsistent here?

bakunin