links vs real directories

John Almberg jalmberg at identry.com
Mon Mar 16 09:06:21 PDT 2009


On Mar 16, 2009, at 11:47 AM, John Almberg wrote:

>
> On Mar 16, 2009, at 11:39 AM, Erik Trulsson wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 11:22:13AM -0400, John Almberg wrote:
>>> I always thought that links to real directories were pretty much the
>>> same as real directories, but I've just discovered a situation where
>>> they are not and I'm wondering if I'm doing something wrong...
>>
>> A *soft* link to a directory entry (be it a directory or a file or  
>> something
>> else) is not quite equivalent to the original entry since they are  
>> easily
>> distinguished and some programs do treat softlinks differently  
>> from other
>> targets.
>
> I can see that, now... If I create a soft link to ~/shared/config,  
> and then cd into the directory, when I type 'ls ..', I get the  
> listing for ~/shared, not ~/app.
>
> Bummer...
>
> I've just dug through man ln, and don't see any obvious solution.  
> Since this must be a problem for anyone who wants to do something  
> like this, I guess I am taking the wrong approach, altogether.
>
> Will have to re-think this....
>
> <smell of burning rubber commences...>

Okay! I guess I wasn't the first to have this problem...

lndir (in ports) solves the problem by creating a set of soft links  
for all the files in the 'linked' directory. Kinda kludgy, but it works.

-- John



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