[Courses] [FS] Lesson 2 - Symlinks Question

Dom Incollingo dom_incollingo at linuxmail.org
Mon Jul 14 22:34:49 EST 2003


Hello,

I really enjoyed lesson 2.  Thanks very much!  But I'm having trouble understanding the ../ directory in the target directory of a symbolic link.

I created the following directories:

   /home/dom/tempStuff/testx/sub1/sub2/sub3
   /home/dom/tempStuff/testy

When the working directory was set to /home/dom/tempStuff, I executed the following command to create a symbolic link:

   ln -s /home/dom/tempStuff/testx/ testy/

After I cd'ed into /home/dom/tempStuff/testy/testx, I executed "ls -la .."  The ls command showed the contents of /home/dom/tempStuff/ - the parent of the target. This makes perfect sense so far. (Just as the course explained.) 

But when I execute "cd ..", the working directory becomes /home/dom/tempStuff/testy.   Since the ../ directory within /home/dom/tempStuff/testy/testx points to /home/dom/tempStuff, I would have expected the "cd .." command to change the working directory to /home/dom/tempStuff.  What am I misunderstanding?

Thanks very much.

Dom
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