skipping symlink with 0-length value

Hello,

I've got filesystems with some symlink entries with 0-length value (all of them are symbolic links to a hard drive within a Wine subdirectory). I don't know how to create them in the first place, my few attempts were a failure.

Example below with the the 'z' symlink.

$ ls -l Wine\ Files/dosdevices/

c -> ../drive_c
z -> ''

When running dsync, it translates to this error during the file creation phase:

ERROR: Create [...]/dosdevices/z symlink() failed, (errno=2 No such file or directory)

Using rsync, those special symlink are explicitly skipped:

skipping symlink with 0-length value: "[...]/Wine Files/dosdevices/z"

This is the code in rsync flist.c:

#ifdef SUPPORT_LINKS
                if (preserve_links && S_ISLNK(file->mode)) {
                        symlink_name = F_SYMLINK(file);
                        symlink_len = strlen(symlink_name);
                        if (symlink_len == 0) {
                                io_error |= IOERR_GENERAL;
                                f_name(file, fbuf);
                                rprintf(FERROR_XFER,
                                    "skipping symlink with 0-length value: %s\n",
                                    full_fname(fbuf));
                                return NULL;
                        }
                } else {
                        symlink_name = NULL;
                        symlink_len = 0;
                }
#endif

It would be nice to have a more explicit message rather than the actual 'No such file or directory'.

Jean-Baptiste

Start by locating dsync's symlink creation path and compare its handling with the zero-length check shown from rsync's flist.c. Done means zero-length symlinks are handled explicitly and no longer surface only the misleading “No such file or directory” error.