Why remove() doesn't remove (symbolic links)?

[Guangliang He]

In article <1991May3.185244.1275 at batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu>, shore at theory.tn.cornell.edu (Melinda Shore) writes:
|> In article <1991May03.174126.13324 at lynx.CS.ORST.EDU> ghe at physics.orst.edu writes:
|> >The remove() system call fails to remove
|> >the sybolic links.
|> 
|> It should work as advertised. 

Which way??? should remove or not??? TFM did not mention a single word on
symbolic links.

|>                               I *strongly* recommend checking errno
|> after the system call fails either by using perror(), or looking at the
|> value of errno yourself.  You do want to know why remove() is failing,
|> don't you?

Yes. I DO want to know why. But TFM says nothing about errno. It only
mentioned that 0 is returned upon successful completion, and non-zero
otherwise. 

When I try to call remove(b) ('b' is a symbolic link to a directory 'a'),
perror prints:

remove: Not a directory

I still don't know why.

|> -- 
|>                     Software longa, hardware brevis
|> Melinda Shore - Cornell Information Technologies - shore at theory.tn.cornell.edu


---
  Guangliang He                |   If anything can go wrong, it will.
  ghe at physics.orst.edu         |            -- Murphy's Law