Can you change what a symlink points to after it is created?

Question

Does any operating system provide a mechanism (system call - not command line program) to change the pathname referenced by a symbolic link (symlink) - other than by unlinking the old one and creating a new one?

The POSIX standard does not. Solaris 10 does not. MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard) does not.

Is there anything that does?

(I'm expecting that the answer is "No".)

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Since proving a negative is hard, let's reorganize the question.

If you know that some (Unix-like) operating system not already listed has no system call for rewriting the value of a symlink (the string returned by readlink()) without removing the old symlink and creating a new one, please add it - or them - in an answer. Since that means there probably won't be a single 'acceptable' answer, I'm converting to Community Wiki.

Answer 1

AFAIK, no, you can't. You have to remove it and recreate it. Actually, you can overwrite a symlink and thus update the pathname referenced by it:

$ ln -s .bashrc test
$ ls -al test
lrwxrwxrwx 1 pascal pascal 7 2009-09-23 17:12 test -> .bashrc
$ ln -s .profile test
ln: creating symbolic link `test': File exists
$ ln -s -f .profile test
$ ls -al test
lrwxrwxrwx 1 pascal pascal 8 2009-09-23 17:12 test -> .profile

EDIT: As the OP pointed out in a comment, using the --force option will make ln perform a system call to unlink() before symlink(). Below, the output of strace on my linux box proving it:

$ strace -o /tmp/output.txt ln -s -f .bash_aliases test
$ grep -C3 ^unlink /tmp/output.txt 
lstat64("test", {st_mode=S_IFLNK|0777, st_size=7, ...}) = 0
stat64(".bash_aliases", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=2043, ...}) = 0
symlink(".bash_aliases", "test")        = -1 EEXIST (File exists)
unlink("test")                          = 0
symlink(".bash_aliases", "test")        = 0
close(0)                                = 0
close(1)                                = 0

So I guess the final answer is "no".

Answer 2

Wouldn't unlinking it and creating the new one do the same thing in the end anyway?

Answer 3

It is not necessary to explicitly unlink the old symlink. You can do this:

ln -s newtarget temp
mv temp mylink

(or use the equivalent symlink and rename calls). This is better than explicitly unlinking because rename is atomic, so you can be assured that the link will always point to either the old or new target. However this will not reuse the original inode.

On some filesystems, the target of the symlink is stored in the inode itself (in place of the block list) if it is short enough; this is determined at the time it is created.

Regarding the assertion that the actual owner and group are immaterial, symlink(7) on Linux says that there is a case where it is significant:

The owner and group of an existing symbolic link can be changed using lchown(2). The only time that the ownership of a symbolic link matters is when the link is being removed or renamed in a directory that has the sticky bit set (see stat(2)).

The last access and last modification timestamps of a symbolic link can be changed using utimensat(2) or lutimes(3).

On Linux, the permissions of a symbolic link are not used in any operations; the permissions are always 0777 (read, write, and execute for all user categories), and can't be changed.