How to unlink file symlinked to itself without destroying

If a file is symlinked to itself then there's no data present and any attempt to access it will result in a loop, and ultimately an error

eg

$ ls -l myfile 
lrwxrwxrwx 1 sweh sweh 19 Sep  9 22:38 myfile -> /path/to/here/myfile

$ cat myfile 
cat: myfile: Too many levels of symbolic links

Since there's no data, deleting these symlinks won't lose any data, because there is no data to preserve.

If you don't get the Too many levels of symbolic links error when you try to cat the file then your file is not a link to itself.

ln will never overwrite a file with a link to itself. You can get a file linked to itself with:

$ ln -s `pwd`/myfile myfile
$ ls -l myfile
lrwxrwxrwx 1 grochmal users 25 Sep 10 03:41 myfile -> /home/grochmal/tmp/myfile

But if you try with a file that contains data:

$ rm -f myfile
$ echo yay > myfile
$ ln -sf `pwd`/myfile myfile
ln: '/home/grochmal/tmp/myfile' and 'myfile' are the same file

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ln, on the other hand, will overwrite a file with a link to another file.

Yet, you can be rather sure that a link to itself is a file that never ever had data (or was explicitly deleted before the creation of the soft link).

(on Linux and using ln from coreutils, that is)