Does rm -rf follow symbolic links?

I have a directory like this:

$ ls -l
total 899166
drwxr-xr-x 12 me scicomp       324 Jan 24 13:47 data
-rw-r--r--  1 me scicomp     84188 Jan 24 13:47 lod-thin-1.000000-0.010000-0.030000.rda
drwxr-xr-x  2 me scicomp       808 Jan 24 13:47 log
lrwxrwxrwx  1 me scicomp        17 Jan 25 09:41 msg -> /home/me/msg

And I want to remove it using rm -r.

However I'm scared rm -r will follow the symlink and delete everything in that directory (which is very bad).

I can't find anything about this in the man pages. What would be the exact behavior of running rm -rf from a directory above this one?

Solution 1:

Example 1: Deleting a directory containing a soft link to another directory.

susam@nifty:~/so$ mkdir foo bar
susam@nifty:~/so$ touch bar/a.txt
susam@nifty:~/so$ ln -s /home/susam/so/bar/ foo/baz
susam@nifty:~/so$ tree
.
├── bar
│   └── a.txt
└── foo
    └── baz -> /home/susam/so/bar/

3 directories, 1 file
susam@nifty:~/so$ rm -r foo
susam@nifty:~/so$ tree
.
└── bar
    └── a.txt

1 directory, 1 file
susam@nifty:~/so$

So, we see that the target of the soft-link survives.

Example 2: Deleting a soft link to a directory

susam@nifty:~/so$ ln -s /home/susam/so/bar baz
susam@nifty:~/so$ tree
.
├── bar
│   └── a.txt
└── baz -> /home/susam/so/bar

2 directories, 1 file
susam@nifty:~/so$ rm -r baz
susam@nifty:~/so$ tree
.
└── bar
    └── a.txt

1 directory, 1 file
susam@nifty:~/so$

Only, the soft link is deleted. The target of the soft-link survives.

Example 3: Attempting to delete the target of a soft-link

susam@nifty:~/so$ ln -s /home/susam/so/bar baz
susam@nifty:~/so$ tree
.
├── bar
│   └── a.txt
└── baz -> /home/susam/so/bar

2 directories, 1 file
susam@nifty:~/so$ rm -r baz/
rm: cannot remove 'baz/': Not a directory
susam@nifty:~/so$ tree
.
├── bar
└── baz -> /home/susam/so/bar

2 directories, 0 files

The file in the target of the symbolic link does not survive.

The above experiments were done on a Debian GNU/Linux 9.0 (stretch) system.

Solution 2:

Your /home/me/msg directory will be safe if you rm -rf the directory from which you ran ls. Only the symlink itself will be removed, not the directory it points to.

The only thing I would be cautious of, would be if you called something like "rm -rf msg/" (with the trailing slash.) Do not do that because it will remove the directory that msg points to, rather than the msg symlink itself.

Solution 3:

rm should remove files and directories. If the file is symbolic link, link is removed, not the target. It will not interpret a symbolic link. For example what should be the behavior when deleting 'broken links'- rm exits with 0 not with non-zero to indicate failure