[CentOS] Strange symbolic link behaviour?

Tue Jul 5 03:13:10 UTC 2011
Eric B. <ebenze at hotmail.com>

Hi,

I'm running CentOS 5 and running into a strange situation with symbolic 
links that I have never seen or noticed before.


If I create the following symbolic link:
[eric at eric-laptop ~]$ pwd
/home/eric
[eric at eric-laptop ~]$ ls Mail
draft  inbox  queue  sent  trash
[eric at eric-laptop ~]$ ln -s Mail/inbox test
[eric at eric-laptop ~]$ ls test
1  2  3  4  5
[eric at eric-laptop ~]$ cd test
[eric at eric-laptop test]$ pwd
/home/eric/test
[eric at eric-laptop test]$ ls
1  2  3  4  5
[eric at eric-laptop test]$ ls ..
draft  inbox  queue  sent  trash


The strange behaviour here is when listing the parent directory (..). 
In this case, ls .. is listing the contents of Mail/ directory - not 
/home/eric.

In the past, I always recall being able to use the parent identified 
(..) to move up one level in the directory structure whether in a 
symlink or not.  In this case, I would have expected ls .. to list the 
contents of /home/eric - not /home/eric/Mail.

Am I wrong?  Am I seeing strange behaviour here?  If so, is there a way 
to enable the behaviour I expect?

Thanks!

Eric