symbolic links used as directory

Question

clones is a link

nrolland at mactoasty in ~
$ la clones
lrwxr-xr-x  1 nrolland  staff    11B Oct  5 16:37 clones -> Sync/clones

from a subdirectory

nrolland at mactoasty in ~/clones/monoidAsComputation/app

$ ls ../../../

list all the files in ~/Sync

whereas this lists all the files in ~

cd ../../../; ls

If I try to point a symbolic link to a location above, that fails although I can cd into relative location

nrolland at mactoasty in ~/clones/monoidAsComputation/app
$ ln -s ../../../.emacs.d/reveal.js

whereas this will, because ln expands the clones symbolic link to its definition............

nrolland at mactoasty in ~/clones/monoidAsComputation/app
$ ln -s ../../../../.emacs.d/reveal.js

Is there any way to get back some sane referential transparency, or at least the same behavior between cd and ln ?

I use zsh, on macos. I will try with other shells

What is `la`? I do not believe that is a standard UNIX command. Do you experience the same using other shells? Which shell are you using? ps. Interesting question! — Pétur Ingi Egilsson, Jan 17 '16 at 15:22
Read [path_resolution(7)](http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/path_resolution.7.html) — Basile Starynkevitch, Jan 17 '16 at 16:47
@BasileStarynkevitch I am sure some people wrote it this way. but how to avoid their crazy scheme is the question — nicolas, Jan 17 '16 at 20:25

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:28

Not sure about zsh, but the following will work for bash:

To get the same behaviour as ln (and any other command), you can use cd -P in bash. In your example, you should see:

# nrolland at mactoasty in ~/clones/monoidAsComputation/app
cd -P ../../..; ls

listing files in ~/Sync, same as ls ../../../ does. You can get this behaviour with simple cd ../../.., by aliasing:

alias cd='cd -P'

For more information, see this answer.

1 Answers1