Linux Symbolic Linking not working as expected

Question

I have achieved my "goal" several times before but am running into an issue I have not yet experienced before. I have a webserver setup with Nginx on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I have my system setup the way I normally would and am attempting to create a symbolic link for the site "virtual host" from the sites-available to the sites-enabled directory. Typically, this is achieve with the following from the primary nginx directory (as root):

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/site.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/site.com

While I can move into the enabled directory and view the symbolic link has "worked", when I try and edit the file directly in the sites-enabled directory I see the file is blank and treated as a new file. As a result, my server does not work as expected and pages do not load. When I simply hard copy or hard link the file into the directory:

ln /etc/nginx/sites-available/site.com /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/site.com

It works without any issue. I however am stuck with two copies of the same file and no symbolic link.

What the heck gives?

Note: here is the structure of my current Nginx directory:

[email protected]:/etc/nginx# ls -l
total 44
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mar  4 17:28 conf.d
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  964 Feb 12 08:41 fastcgi_params
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2837 Feb 12 08:41 koi-utf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2223 Feb 12 08:41 koi-win
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3463 Feb 12 08:41 mime.types
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1022 Mar  4 21:15 nginx.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  596 Feb 12 08:41 scgi_params
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mar  4 21:15 sites-available
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mar  4 21:19 sites-enabled
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  623 Feb 12 08:41 uwsgi_params
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3610 Feb 12 08:41 win-utf

Thank you for your help ahead of time!

Edit 1: Showing the contents of the sites-enabled folder with ls -l:

[email protected]:/etc/nginx/sites-enabled# ls -l
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Mar  5 10:23 www -> www

Final Answer

So after help from the @Insyte and @Michael Hampton, I figured out how to reproduce my error occassionally. The scenario played out as follows:

[email protected]:/etc/nginx# cd sites-available
[email protected]:/etc/nginx/sites-available# ls
www
[email protected]:/etc/nginx/sites-available# ln -s www /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/www
[email protected]:/etc/nginx/sites-available# cd /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
[email protected]:/etc/nginx/sites-enabled# ls -l
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 Mar  5 10:48 www -> www

I am not aware of "why" but turns out that if I use full absolute paths each time then the issue does not exist.

Answer 1

So what you have there is a symbolic link that links back to itself. I don't see how that's possible with the command you listed at the top of your question, so I suspect this particular symbolic link was created differently.

I can replicate your scenario like this:

sazerac:~ insyte$ cd testlinks/
sazerac:~/testlinks insyte$ ls
sazerac:~/testlinks insyte$ ln -s www www
sazerac:~/testlinks insyte$ ls -l
total 8
lrwxr-xr-x  1 insyte  staff  3 Mar  5 10:33 www -> www

Let's try an experiment. Execute the following commands exactly as listed:

echo "hello insyte" > /etc/nginx/sites-available/insyte
ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/insyte /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
ls -l /etc/nginx/sites-enabled|grep insyte
cat /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/insyte

Answer 2

You've somehow managed to create a symbolic link that links to itself. I didn't even know you could do that, but I'm quite sure it won't have the result you want.

To fix it, remove the symlink and recreate it correctly.

rm -f /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/www

Or just use the -f option to ln and it may remove the invalid symlink for you.

ln -fs /etc/nginx/sites-available/www /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/www

Answer 3

Out of habit:

• I always use ln -sfn to ensure any old links are updated without trouble.
• I always use an absolute path:

ln -sfn /absolute/path/to/original /absolute/path/to/link

That keeps me out of much trouble.