ls shows a directory but it is inaccessible

Question

ls shows a directory but it is inaccessible

I was trying to copy one folder from one location to another. The folder is about 6.4 Gb.

So I did

cp -r source_folder level1/val

after that, I went into the level1 folder and checked:

level1$ ls
val

But If I try to cd into val, an error is raised:

level1$ cd val
-bash: cd: val: No such file or directory

And it does not appear to be copying anything, either:

level1$ du -sh val
0   val

I also checked with python if the directory exists or not, but it also says that it does not exist

>>> import os
>>> os.path.exists('level1/val')
False

I can’t even delete the folder that has been created:

level1$ rmdir val
rmdir: failed to remove 'val': Not a directory

On the other hand, I was able to delete it as if it was a file:

level1$ rm val
level1$ ls
level1$

What is going on? And how can I make sure to copy the folder correctly?

EDIT
Added the output of ls -ld source_folder level1/val which returns

lrwxrwxrwx 1 user1 dinfk      4 Jun 20 12:05 source_folder -> test
drwxr-sr-x 2 user2  systems 4096 Aug 27 19:02 level1/val

Asked By: Ant

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Source

Answer 1

source_folder – is symlink that refer to the test directory

But you directory path in symlink is relative. If you use absolute path (e.g. /home/user/test) in symlink copying will happen normally.

If you want to copy all files from the directory to which the symbolic link points, you could use -d option with cp command.

Answered By: Egor Vasilyev

Answer 2

Evidently, the val that resulted from the copy the first time round is a broken symbolic link.

ls lists val because it exists: there is a directory entry called val.
cd val complains “No such file or directory” because val is a broken symbolic link. cd needs to access the target of the link, but the target doesn’t exist (that’s the definition of a broken symlink).
du val shows 0 because a symbolic link doesn’t use any storage space. (The space for the name and metadata is not counted.)
os.path.exists returns False for broken symbolic links.
rmdir val rightfully complains that val is not a directory, since it’s a symbolic link.
rm val deletes val normally, since val is a file that isn’t a directory.

You report:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 user1 dinfk      4 Jun 20 12:05 source_folder -> test

The command cp -r copies the symbolic link as a symbolic link. Since source_folder is a symbolic link whose target is test, this results in level1/val being a symbolic link whose target is test. The target of a symbolic link is a simple string, it doesn’t “track” anything. Symbolic links that don’t start with a / are relative. level1/val is a symbolic link whose target is test so it points to level1/test. Since level1/test doesn’t exist, the symbolic link is broken.

Later you saw:

drwxr-sr-x 2 user2  systems 4096 Aug 27 19:02 level1/val

This time you did something different and copied a directory tree.

To copy the target of the link rather than the link itself, you can use

cp -r source_folder/ level1/val

The trailing slash tells the cp command to act on the directory that the link points to rather than on the symbolic link itself. If the argument is a directory, this doesn’t make any difference.

Answered By: Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'

Answer 3

In case someone also appears to have this particular problem where the proposed solution does not work: Make sure that you really spelled the directory name correctly and pay special attention to special (non-ASCII) characters in its name.

In my case I had the following situation:

$ ll
total 68
-rw-r--r-- 1 st_ac131646 st_us-031110 1387 29. Jun 10:02 cu2_o2_nh3_6-1_60.xyz
-rw-r--r-- 1 st_ac131646 st_us-031110 1387 29. Jun 10:03 cu2_o2_nh3_6-2_20.xyz
drwxr-xr-x 2 st_ac131646 st_us-031110 4096 29. Jun 09:17 rḱs
drwxr-xr-x 2 st_ac131646 st_us-031110 4096 29. Jun 13:20 tests

But when I tried e.g. cd rks or rmdir rks, the system would always tell me that no such file or directory existed. I could even do a mkdir rks and now all of a sudden there appeared a second directory with this name in the ls output (which was accessible as one would expect).

In any case, when you look closer, I must have accidentally created the first directory with a ḱ instead of a regular k which is why when typing the name as rks (instead of rḱs) the system obviously told me that this does not exist.

So long story short: Double-check your spelling and potentially try copy-pasting the name from the ls output.

Answered By: Raven