Strange symlink X11 in /bin

General Discussion
1

I just discovered something that I wanted to bring to your attention, because I don’t really know how or why this happed but is nevertheless remarkable.

I dicovered it by accident by doing a search in my dietpi-backup and suddenly a cascade of symlinks showed up in my results, looking like this
du: cannot access '/mnt/backup/data/bin/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X11/X111 etc.
So I checked /bin and found a symlink looking like this:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 1 15. Feb 2021 X11 → ./

link creation is Feb 2021 but
I just recently installed MATE and RealVNC server and used the Pi headless before.
I have deleted the link now.

2

Never have seen this before. Could be something dedicated to your SBC :thinking:

3

Sorry,
SBC?

4

SBC - single board computer.
What kind of device do you use?

5
6

It’s a Raspberry Pi 4B

7

Thanks for the Wiki link.
As i googled it first hits were
Saia-Burgess Electronics,
SB Chiemgau Traunstein,
Sensotronic Brake Control,
Server-based Computing
Session Border Controller,
Southwestern Bell Corporation
Subband Codec,
System-Basis-Chip

8

ok the link is created by Xorg Server package directly. But it should be X11 -> . and not X11 → ./

root@DietPi4:~# ls -la /bin/ | grep X11
lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root          1 Feb 15  2021 X11 -> .
root@DietPi4:~#
9

thanks for the info. Interesting. Curious how that happened.
You think its essential so that I should recreate it?

update:
just tried to
/bin# ln -s . X11
and got
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 3 2. Jun 11:49 X11 ->. /

10

not sure for what it is used. But you could try to set it like I have on my test system

11

please see post above.
I did something wrong with the ln syntax?
ln -s . X11

12

any idea why?

13

I think that should be fine. If I’m not mistaken, the symbolic link is expected as it is created by the apt package itself. I’m not sure what the aim is, but it seems to have been there for ages on Linux systems. xorg - Why are there infinitely many x11 subdirectories in /usr/bin/x11? - Ask Ubuntu

14

Ok. I hope it doesn’t create problems with backup to ozher machines. I discovered the cascade on my nas (openmediavault) where I am not sure now wheter it copied the symlink or replaced it by another copy of usr/bin.
I just rember having a cascade of X11 folders.
So there might be a potential for error.

15

We use rsync to create backups. This should only back up the symbolic link. You can check this by accessing the location of the backup. The same link should be there.