Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!munnari.oz.au!mudla!ok
From: ok@mudla.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Richard O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Symlinks and ..
Message-ID: <2755@munnari.oz.au>
Date: 20 Nov 89 06:21:45 GMT
Sender: news@cs.mu.oz.au
Lines: 20

This isn't a question, it's a tip.

I have a program which normalises file names so that I can tuck them away
in a safe place and use them again later even if I'm in a different
directory &c &c.  One thing that this program did was to change
	<prefix>/<directory>/..
to	<prefix>
The way I handled things like "../../rule" was to prepend the current
directory and then just apply this rule, so e.g.
	/tip/ok/../../vmunix	-> /vmunix

THIS WAS A MISTAKE.  The rule is INVALID when <prefix>/<directory> is a
symlink.  In my case, there is some piece of black magic so that
	/tip/ok
is really
	/mount/mullauna/tip/ok
so that everything else in the system thinks that
	/tip/ok/../../vmunix	-> /mount/mullauna/vmunix

I am less found of symlinks than I used to be.