samtools won't follow symlinks?

[Will Nelson]

Seems strange but when I do a simple command like

samtools view ../../Tophat/Results/B6Br1.bam

where the target is a symlink, I get:

open: No such file or directory
[main_samview] fail to open "../../Tophat/Results/B6Br1.bam" for reading.

The symlink exists:

ls -l ../../Tophat/Results/B6Br1.bam
lrwxrwxrwx 1 will bioinfo 39 May 13 09:37 ../../Tophat/Results/B6Br1.bam -> dirs/B6Br1/tophat_out/accepted_hits.bam

And when I run the same samtools command using the link target accepted_hits.bam, it works.

It's inconvenient because it means to reorganize a bunch of tophat outputs, which all have the same name, I have to physically copy them.

[GenoMax]

Symlink is working for me with samtools view (with either the link in cwd or from some place else).

[WhatsOEver]

For me it works too. Are you sure, your symlink is set correctly? The path to your accepted_hits.bam looks strange to me, as leading "/" or "../" are missing. I would suggest to use full path when creating symlinks, then you may also copy them elsewhere without running into problems.

ls -l ../../Tophat/Results/B6Br1.bam
lrwxrwxrwx 1 will bioinfo 39 May 13 09:37 ../../Tophat/Results/B6Br1.bam -> dirs/B6Br1/tophat_out/accepted_hits.bam

[Will Nelson]

Thanks, yes, that was it...I did not realize that links which are created using a relative path don't work if they're copied to another location! Live and learn...well, I'll probably just delete this thread since it had nothing to do with samtools and nobody else having the same symlink problem will ever find it.