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On my CentOS , i was on the following directory:-

/home/coolcatg

and that directory contain a website folder named "public_html".

I simply copied that folder to /home directory :-

[root@server coolcatg]# cp -R public_html /home/coolcatgbk

Now when i want to use the copied directory, i noticed it converted somehow to file instead of folder

lrwxrwxrwx   1 root       root           40 Apr 29 19:15 coolcatgbk -> ./domains/cdomainname.com/public_html

How can i recover it?

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  • You'll need to add a / at the end of public_html to have it be treated as a directory
    – Vinayak
    Apr 29, 2020 at 20:05
  • That is a link and I don't know how you made it using cp -R.. Notice the "l" at the front of the permissions and the "->" between coolcatbk and the path?.. Also.. seeing that you don't know what you are doing completely yet (we've all been there).. you WILL hurt yourself as root.
    – Señor CMasMas
    Apr 29, 2020 at 20:07

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it looks like what you copied was a symbolic link, aka symlink, which is similar to a "Shortcut" on windows. This symlink pointed to a relative path though, meaning it points to another file relative to where the symlink is currently located. Since you moved the symlink, it is now pointing to a non-existent location.

You can tell this by looking at the ls -l output; to the far left is an "l", meaning "link", instead of a "-" for regular files or a "d" for directories, and after the filename is a "->", and to the right of that is the path it points to. You can also tell it is a "relative" path because the first character of the path is not a /. The ./ refers to the current directory. You can also have symlink paths like "linkname -> folder1/" which would point to folder1 in the current directory. An absolute path would be like "linkname -> /path/to/folder1/" which specifies the entire path leading up to the location.

To fix this, you can first run rm /home/coolcatgbk. If it is actually a directory, "rm" without the "-r" argument will not delete anything. On CentOS, unless you changed something, it will also prompt you like "rm: remove symbolic link '/home/coolcatgbk"? You can can then run

ln -s /old/path/cdomainname.com/public_html/ /home/coolcatgbk

You will have to replace "/old/path" in that command with the location you were at when you ran [root@server coolcatg]# cp -R public_html /home/coolcatgbk above.

Also, as Señor CMasMas mentioned in a comment, moving directories around without being familiar with very basics like this is pretty risky, even as a non-root user. I hope this is non-critical stuff, and you have backups.

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