Broken junctions and symlinks halt recursive cp and rsync operations?

Matt D. codespunk@gmail.com
Thu Nov 16 11:55:00 GMT 2017


I can make a directory 'a/' and a symlink 'b' of 'b -> a' and copy 'b' 
to 'c' which also points to 'a':

$mkdir a
$CYGWIN= ln -s a b
$CYGWIN= cp -a b c

On Linux if I break the link as such:

$rm -r a c

I can still copy the broken link:

$cp -a b c

But on Cygwin I cannot do this for native junctions and native symbolic 
links (note that Cygwin symlinks work fine in this scenario). This issue 
breaks both cp and rsync when working with either form of native links.

$rm -r a b c

$mkdir a
$CYGWIN=winsymlinks:nativestrict ln -s a b
$rm -r a

See here:

$CYGWIN=winsymlinks:nativestrict cp -a b c
cp: cannot create symbolic link 'c': No such file or directory

And:

$rsync -a b c
rsync: symlink "/c/test/c" -> "a" failed: No such file or directory (2)
rsync error: some files/attrs were not transferred (see previous errors) 
(code 23) at main.c(1196) [sender=3.1.2]

Is there a way to recover from this? It breaks copy operations of 
directories which contain broken symlinks where I would expect the 
broken link to be copied as-is.


Matt D.

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