#7971: doesDirectoryExist description differs from its behavior ----------------------------------------+----------------------------------- Reporter: dsf | Owner: Type: bug | Status: new Priority: normal | Component: libraries/directory Version: 7.6.3 | Keywords: Os: Unknown/Multiple | Architecture: Unknown/Multiple Failure: Incorrect result at runtime | Blockedby: Blocking: | Related: ----------------------------------------+----------------------------------- Comment(by Fuuzetsu): I have created testDir: it was one level up. It seems that the formatting swallowed up ‘../’ as is also apparent in your own snippet (so my link was pointing to ‘../testDir’ which existed (I guess ‘/tmp/testDir’ should be used in the future to avoid swallowing up in the WikiFormatting blocks)). Having said that, I did some further investigation and here's what I uncovered: If the directory linked to exists in the same directory or in any subdirectories, doesDirectoryExists will return True. If the directory linked to exists higher up in the file hierarchy, it will return False. relative/absolute paths seem to not matter. So a link ‘/tmp/test/linkToSomething’ to ‘/tmp/something’ will return False even if ‘/tmp/something’ is present on the filesystem. A link in ‘/tmp/test/linkToOther’ to ‘/tmp/test/foo/bar/baz/someDir’ will return True given that the someDir exists. This also means that it might in fact be following symlinks: it just doesn't matter because the only links to return True for directories are in the same/subdirectory that is being removed so they would be gone anyway. I don't think this strange behaviour is by design and should be fixed, or carefully documented if it is by design. -- Ticket URL: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/7971#comment:9 GHC http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ The Glasgow Haskell Compiler