Had a little mishap yesterday: I managed to wipe out the index.php file from the Wordpress install of my other blog. At first I was at disbelief of my own stupidity, but once I got past the panic, I realized I hadn't done anything I hadn't intended to, so it had to be Filezilla's fault. Today I did some testing and found out exactly how this had happened.

The file was erased when I deleted an excess copy of the Wordpress install I had in the same directory as the actual, in-use install and index.php. What I now realized was that the excess Wordpress directory had had a symbolic link inside it, pointing back to my index.php. Filezilla had followed this link, deleted the file it pointed to, and actually had left the link file untouched! This caused the removal of the directory to fail, but which at first escaped me, since at that point I realized my index.php was gone.

I'm not sure if such behaviour is intended or not, or perhaps even a feature of the ftp protocol, but it certainly wasn't the kind I was expecting when I chose to remove the directory holding the symbolic link. What I was expecting was just the link file be removed, just as it is when I rm it from a SSH connection.

I just went through Filezilla's settings and couldn't find anything related to symbolic links there, so as it is, this behaviour can't be changed. I just need to be careful with it, since I'm still sticking with Filezilla as my ftp client.