Symlink inspectors not working correctly

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(imported topic written by SystemAdmin)

The symlink inspectors do not return symlinks that are broken (meaning their target does not exist). The documentation on these inspectors claim that they do return broken symlinks, so I’m guessing they do not behave as intended. I’ve tested this on both AIX and Linux, using both files and dirs as symlink targets.

Here’s some QNA from AIX demonstrating this. You can see that the second question should return True, but it does not. Has anyone else has stumbled upon this, or is there already a fix planned for this issue?

Q: (operating system, version of client)

A: AIX 6.1, 8.1.617.0

Q: exists symlinks of folder “/zTest”

A: False

Q: exists symlink “/zTest/target”

A: True

Q: value of symlink “/zTest/target”

A: /zTest/test2/target

Q: exists file (value of symlink “/zTest/target” as string)

A: False

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(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)

Its not obvious from this that anything is broken as we can’t see what the OS states these directories are.

The second does work for me on RHE5 for a working symlink

If you could paste an ls -l for the /zTest directory I might be able to determine what is happening but as far as I can tell it works as intended.

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Related article:

RFE 63735 has been opened for this issue (symlink inspectors do not work as advertised on broken symlinks)