My first FreeBSD bug fix

I came across an interesting bug recently while writing tests for utilities in the FreeBSD base system. Here is how it goes -

I was trying to make a kyua based test for the ‘-F’ option of ln(1). This was the command which I ran successfully -

$ mkdir A B
$ truss -o ln.log ln -sF A B  # '-f' is assumed to be present by default

Actual results -
It so happens here that even though the target directory B exists, neither unlink nor rmdir is being called [ideally rmdir should be called as specified in src/bin/ln/ln.c (line 307)]. The output of the above command is that B contains a broken symbolic link A to A. I used truss(1) to trace the system calls when executing the above command and the rmdir() system call was missing from the log.

Expected results -
The expected behavior was that directory B is supposed to be deleted and a new symbolic link B should be made to A. This is now fixed in r320172.

More details can be found here [1][2].