Syncing links with --links between locally mounted drives fails due to: readlink, no such file or directory

[ncw (Nick Craig-Wood)]

@Matt812g

Maybe I misunderstood. I assumed that, using --link, a real symlink in the source would ALWAYS be translated into a FILE.rclonelink file in the destination (instead of an actual symlink)?

Its a two way thing.

If you are writing a file to a local file system called file.rclonelink it will get translated into a symlink called file.

@Matt812g

The manual says for --links:

Translate symlinks to/from regular files with a '.rclonelink' extension

That is what the "to/from" bit implies.

Here is an example

$ ls -l src
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 ncw ncw 8 Mar 20 12:11 dangling -> not-here

$ rclone -l tree src
/
└── dangling.rclonelink

0 directories, 1 files

$ rclone -l tree dst
/

0 directories, 0 files

$ rclone copy -l -v src dst
2023/04/05 10:54:32 INFO  : dangling.rclonelink: Copied (new)
2023/04/05 10:54:32 INFO  : 
Transferred:   	          8 B / 8 B, 100%, 0 B/s, ETA -
Transferred:            1 / 1, 100%
Elapsed time:         0.0s

$ rclone -l tree dst
/
└── dangling.rclonelink

0 directories, 1 files

$ ls -l dst
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 ncw ncw 8 Mar 20 12:11 dangling -> not-here

$ 

And here is an example with only setting --links for the source which will copy the .rclonelink file.

$ rm dst/dangling 
$ rclone -l tree dst
/

0 directories, 0 files
$ rclone copy -v :local,links:src dst
2023/04/05 10:55:38 INFO  : dangling.rclonelink: Copied (new)
2023/04/05 10:55:38 INFO  : 
Transferred:   	          8 B / 8 B, 100%, 0 B/s, ETA -
Transferred:            1 / 1, 100%
Elapsed time:         0.0s

$ rclone tree dst
/
└── dangling.rclonelink

0 directories, 1 files

$ ls -l dst
total 4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ncw ncw 8 Mar 20 12:11 dangling.rclonelink

$ cat dst/dangling.rclonelink 
not-here
$

Hopefully that makes more sense!