Sep
03
2006

Please, Just Make The Symlink

(Add / View Comments) (0)Sunday, September 3, 2006 - 10:15:44 pm
(Posted Under: Geek)
An interest experience with Gentoo tonight. I'm in the process of converting from exim to postfix for email. Of course, testing it out in a virtual machine.

Trying to emerge certificates so that sending through gmail's server without warning, portage complained about the symlink for /etc/make.profile not being valid. After some googling, I realised that this is probably because of an emerge-sync removing the 2005.0 profile I was previously. Fine. Update it to 2005.1, which is still in portage:

# ln -s /usr/portage/profiles/default-linux/x86/2005.1 /etc/make.profile
Easy, until the symlink was silently not created. No error, but no symlink. What the hell is up with my file system, it refusing to create anything in /etc. Or for that matter, /. Hell, if I do an 'ls' on anything, the directory is seemingly empty, yet tab completion shows files in the directories. WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?.

Once 'ls' wasn't working, I finally caught on - I'm really big on bash's history. I'll more often recall the history and modify the command, than retype it from scratch. Which is fine, except for when the previous command line begins with '#' (the comment character for you non techie readers) and you don't realise it! [smile] No wonder none of my commands were doing anything! [smile]

I really thought that was going to turn out to be one of the weirdest problems I've ever encountered. As it turns out, it was just my stupidity - again. [wink]

Note to self - be careful with cut and paste in an xterm when your shell prompt ends in a '#'. [smile] I really should just blame this whole debarkle on using the default Gentoo bash prompt on this machine, rather than my more familar custom one.
Now Playing: Better Than Ezra - King Of New Orleans

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