I ran into a rather obscure bug the other day, but while uncommon, it can cause damage you would not otherwise expect if you use file-level symbolic links. So this is just a warning about that.
Specifically, if you create a table with the .MYI and .MYD files in a different directory, using symbolic links – either manually or using CREATE TABLE .. INDEX DIRECTORY=”" DATA DIRECTORY=”", and then run myisamchk on the table and specify .MYI, you will corrupt the table.
Creating these manually is not so common, but the CREATE TABLE .. INDEX DIRECTORY=”" DATA DIRECTORY=”" is much more common, which creates file-level symbolic links (for the .MYI and .MYD files, respectively) in the datadir and stores the actual file(s) in the location specified. So it leaves you with this setup.
Therefore, if you later run myisamchk on one of these files, do not specify .MYI in the command invocation. If you invoke myisamchk –help, …
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