On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 10:21:01AM -0800, John R Pierce wrote:
> for instance, say /home/pierce is a symlink to /home2/pierce and I'm
> in /home and go cd pierce, then go cd .. in *some* unix systems,
> that cd .. takes me back to home, in others takes me to /home2
It's actually shell dependent, not Unix platform dependent. Some shells
(eg bash, ksh) perform parsing of the "cd" parameter and so will appear
to back-out of symlinks. Other (typically older) shells just naively
do a chdir("..") call, which will take you to the real parent directory.
Sometimes both behaviours are useful, so I've created a function "up"
up()
{
cd "`/bin/pwd`/.."
}
So...
/home/sweh$ cd public_html
/home/sweh/public_html$ cd ..
/home/sweh$ cd public_html
/home/sweh/public_html$ up
/autofs/publish$ ls -l /home/sweh/public_html
lrwxrwxrwx 1 sweh sweh 20 Jun 8 2008 /home/sweh/public_html -> /autofs/publish/public_html/
Symlinks combined with automounters... fun :-)
--
rgds
Stephen