Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!sun-barr!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!ulysses!hector!ekrell
From: ekrell@hector.UUCP (Eduardo Krell)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Symlinks and ..
Message-ID: <12407@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com>
Date: 20 Nov 89 15:28:44 GMT
References: <2755@munnari.oz.au>
Sender: netnews@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com
Reply-To: ekrell@hector.UUCP (Eduardo Krell)
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 18

In article <2755@munnari.oz.au> ok@mudla.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Richard O'Keefe) writes:

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

Welcome to the club ...

".." should be treated as a logical operator that moves you one level
closer to the root by stripping the last component off your current
working directory (which is whatever path you used to get to where
you are). This preserves the "/usr/foo/bar/.. == /usr/foo" paradigm.

Besides, this is the only sensible interpreation of ".." on implementations
where ".." does not exist physically as a directory entry (which is
not required by POSIX).
    
Eduardo Krell                   AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ

UUCP: {att,decvax,ucbvax}!ulysses!ekrell  Internet: ekrell@ulysses.att.com