On Dec 8, 2024, at 16:16, Stephen Morris <steve.morris.au@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > >> On 7/12/24 17:09, Samuel Sieb wrote: >> On 12/6/24 7:14 PM, Stephen Morris wrote: >>>> On 7/12/24 13:28, Samuel Sieb wrote: >>>> There's nothing accumulating here. The lock file is checked at application startup. If it's still valid, then the new process will not start, probably passing information to the existing process. If it's not valid, then the old lock is deleted and a new one created. Standard practice, just using a symlink instead of a file. >>> >>> What determines that the lock file is valid? In the case of Thunderbird where it creates a lock file in folder for my profile and the folder where Thunderbird is installed to, the symlinks are dangling while Thunderbird is running, if firefox is the same while firefox is running the lock symlink is dangling and after firefox shuts down it is left there dangling, hence what determines whether or not it is valid? >> >> It's not actually a link, so it's not "dangling". It's just information. The information is an IP address and a process id. I'm not sure how the IP address is used, but the process id is how it knows if it's valid. If the process exists, it's valid. > > I'm referring to it as dangling because when you run "sudo symlinks -r | grep -i dangling", which is the documented method for determining "dangling" symlinks, reports those links as "dangling". My assumption is the definition of a "dangling" symlink is a link that points to an entity that doesn't exist. I've have also seen Fedora documentation in the past that refers to those sorts of symlinks as "broken". Sure, if a package is supposed to use a symlink in /usr/bin to point at an executable in /usr/libexec/foo/, then, yeah it’s broken, but as you have aptly demonstrated, not all dangling symlinks represent something broken. They’re just another way that people abuse filesystem data as a data structure. Deleting dangling symlinks haphazardly is not a solution, you need to use the package database and understand what is supposed to exist before blithely deleting the symlink. This is why I suggested that the tool wasn’t appropriate when used on all the filesystem. -- Jonathan Billings -- _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to users-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
