-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf Of Ulrik S. Kofod Sent: Friday, May 13, 2005 2:25 AM To: centos@centos.org Subject: [CentOS] When ".." isn't the same? (not a problem

I don't understand why ".." isn't working the same way for "ls" and

"cd"

when inside a symbolic link. The reason I ask is that I made a link to a directory with some scripts that saves output in "../output.txt" and I could not find the output until I found that ".." isn't the directory you see when you do a $pwd. I

solved

the problem by making a directory and then make a link to each script in there.

I would just like to know:

1. if there is a good reason to this behaviour.
2. if there is a rule, so you know when ".." is level up from $ pwd

and

when it is one level up from the link target. 3) if there is an alternativ way to point to the parent directory.

I believe I understand what you're describing and it's been a long time since I've had this 'issue' but if I remember correctly, it's a function of your shell, which I believe is going to be bash. It tries to be intelligent about its symlink handling. It remembers the cd path you used to get to that symlink and 'cd ..' sends you back the same way you got in. It basically treats symlinks as real directories, not pointers. This can be very useful but it can also be annoying. I'll bet if you use tcsh, which uses a more literal interpretation of the file-structure, it would work as you expect. I wasn't ever interested in it enough to see if it could be disabled in bash.

-- Marc