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From: ekrell@hector..UUCP (Eduardo Krell)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Symbolic Links
Message-ID: <2838@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com>
Date: Thu, 20-Aug-87 21:55:49 EDT
Article-I.D.: ulysses.2838
Posted: Thu Aug 20 21:55:49 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 22-Aug-87 14:32:23 EDT
References: <8731@brl-adm.ARPA> <2789@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com> <1781@munnari.oz> <2809@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com> <1788@munnari.oz>
Sender: daemon@ulysses.homer.nj.att.com
Reply-To: ekrell@ulysses (Eduardo Krell)
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Murray Hill
Lines: 45

In article <1788@munnari.oz> kre@munnari.UUCP writes:

>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).

What you're saying is that there is no problem and thus we disagree.

>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.

I think it is a problem. How many system administrators out there have had
to explain this to new Unix users?. Even not-so-naice users are bothered
by this. I used to hit this problem every time I did "cd /usr/include/sys"
and then "cd ..". This is an operation that I do at least daily. Back when
I used the C-shell, I would end up in /sys or someplace like that.

Now that I use ksh, I end up exactly where I want : /usr/include.

If you take a poll asking people where they would expect to be after
doing "cd /usr/include/sys; cd ..", I would bet a large majority to
answer "/usr/include". It's intuitive and it makes sense. If the system
behaves in a way that's different from what most people expect, then it's
broken as far as I'm concerned.

>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.

When I do a "cd /a/b" and end up in a different directory, say, /c/d,
then the symbolic link IS equivalent to the directory it points to.
Once I "cd" to that directory, I get to the same i-node as /c/d.
That qualifies as being equivalent, I would say.
    
    Eduardo Krell                   AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill

    {ihnp4,seismo,ucbvax}!ulysses!ekrell