Hi, > So rather than relying on ln to remove the link, why don't we just > explicitly remove it with rm -f?
sounds good, I ran into similar issues already. ln -nfs does not follow the target if it is a symlink -n, --no-dereference treat LINK_NAME as a normal file if it is a symbolic link to a directory but I think a simple rm -f will do as well, and avoid potential interoperability issues. However wget has a similar issue, if the $MPFR.tar.gz file is already there, maybe incomplete, the wget chooses a new name, so I'd suggest to rm -f that file as well, and the whole $MPFR subtree while you are already there. Bernd.