Question

I had following directory-structure:

/user1/
/user1/bla.cfm
/index.cfm

and created a directory called users:

/users/
/user1/
/user1/bla.cfm
/index.cfm

I set up a symbolic link (under linux with ln -s) from /user1/ to /users/user1/ and tried to <cfinclude> the bla.cfm which worked good. From index.cfm:

<CFINCLUDE template="users/user1/bla.cfm" />

After some testing I removed the symbolic link (/users/user1/) and moved the real directory /user1/ to /users/user1/. Suddenly the bla.cfm did not let me include and threw a template not found exception.

After setting up the symbolic link from /users/user1/ to /user1/ the <cfinclude> worked again. I cannot reproduce this on our development server!? Any hints how to fix this?

Btw all user-directories (user2, user3, etc.) have a bla.cfm inside – and just 2 are having the problem described above. It seems that those users were active and the bla.cfm was included via the symlink. Are those symlinks and their targets cached somewhere?

EDIT:

I tried already clearing the template-cache in CFAdmin.

Further testing:
from index.cfm:

expandpath("/users/user1/bla.cfm") -> correct path
fileexists(expandpath("/users/user1/bla.cfm")) -> saying "YES"

but:

fileexists(expandpath("users/user1/bla.cfm")) -> saying "NO"

Answer 1

Restarting coldfusion server instance fixed the problem.