255735 - "cannot be found" opening file:///directory containing broken symbolic link (symlink).

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 207973

(Core :: Networking: File, defect)

Description

[Paul Gilmartin]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040803
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040803

When a file: URL identifies a directory containing a broken
symlink, opening the directory fails with "! The file ...
cannot be found."  (There are no broken links in the path to
the directory itself.)

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
sh-2.05b$ uname -a
Darwin PaulGilm.local 7.5.0 Darwin Kernel Version 7.5.0:
    Thu Aug  5 19:26:16 PDT 2004; root:xnu/xnu-517.7.21.obj~3/RELEASE_PPC
    Power Macintosh powerpc
sh-2.05b$ 

... I create a directory:

    sh-2.05b$ mkdir /Users/paulgilm/testzilla
    sh-2.05b$ 

and in Mozilla, I type and open the URL for that directory:

    file://localhost/Users/paulgilm/testzilla
    
Mozilla displays the expected trivial page.  Now I create a deliberately
broken symlink:

    sh-2.05b$ ln -s /no/such/file /Users/paulgilm/testzilla/fubar
    sh-2.05b$ cat                 /Users/paulgilm/testzilla/fubar
    cat: /Users/paulgilm/testzilla/fubar: No such file or directory
    sh-2.05b$ 

In Mozilla, I click "Reload" and get:

    ! The file /Users/paulgilm/testzilla cannot be found.
          Please check the location and try again.

So I remove the broken symlink:

    sh-2.05b$ rm                  /Users/paulgilm/testzilla/fubar
    sh-2.05b$ 

Now, "Reload" refreshes the page without error.  ISTR a similar problem with
Netscape, but I never analyzed it to this level of detail.
Actual Results:  
"! The file /Users/paulgilm/testzilla cannot be found."  is displayed
as an alert.

Expected Results:  
The contents of /Users/paulgilm/testzilla except for the broken symlink,
fubar, should be displayed, or the contents should be displayed with an
indication that "fubar" is a broken symlink.

Thanks,
gil

ISTR a similar problem with Netscape.

My surmise is that a subroutine is looping over entries in the directory,
doing a stat() on each.  On getting error status from stat() for the
broken symlink, it does "return -1" when "continue" would be more appropriate.
The caller observes the error status and errno==ENOENT and reports the
entire directory unavailable.

Comment 1

[benc]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 207973 ***