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From: kre@munnari.oz (Robert Elz)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Symbolic Links
Message-ID: <1788@munnari.oz>
Date: Thu, 20-Aug-87 04:44:39 EDT
Article-I.D.: munnari.1788
Posted: Thu Aug 20 04:44:39 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 22-Aug-87 09:47:22 EDT
References: <8731@brl-adm.ARPA> <2789@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com> <1781@munnari.oz> <2809@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com>
Organization: Comp Sci, Melbourne Uni, Australia
Lines: 39

In article <2809@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com>,
ekrell@hector..UUCP (Eduardo Krell) writes [& quotes me, the middle line]:
> 
> >> Doing it in the shell fixes the "cd /a/b; cd .." problem. But shouldn't
> >> "cat ../foo" be the same as "cd ..; cat foo" ?. Now, how are you going
> >> to do THAT in the shell?.
> >
> >Or leave the symlink semantics as they are in BSD ...
> 
> But this not a solution to the problem above.

It depends what you define the "problem" to be.  The problem you
posed initially I see as the inconsistency in the handling of ".."
in the shell as a special case (since ".." would mean different
things in "cd" commands and in others).

Leaving the semantics as they are in BSD does indeed fix this
problem, ".." is entirely consistent (unless you've added a shell
that breaks things).

I don't see that

	$ cd /a/b
	$ cd ..
	$ pwd
	/c

is a problem at all, and it doesn't need to be fixed, especially
it isn't worth breaking anything, or leaving inconsistencies to fix it.

> It depends on your definition of consistency. The way BSD did symbolic
> links, you can't make them transparent.

Fine.  That's not a problem.  As I tried to say, the solution is to
simply stop pretending that a symlink to a directory is somehow
equivalent to the directory itself, and see it as being an object
with its own existance, semantics, and usefulness.

kre