On 27 May 2010, at 21:16, Bakul Shah wrote:
If BSD had implemented ".." correctly (i.e. walk back up one level in the given path), symlinks would have been more useful and less surprising.
This "correct" implementation of symlinks has never seemed right to me. Linux / Bash used to do it the "wrong" way as recently as 2001 if not more recently. I was much more comfortable with the "wrong" way, with symlinks just being a portal to another place entirely, and I wish I could pinpoint why. Having the path "faked" after following a symlink just feels badly wrong, and I wish I could put a semantic reason on it.
-- Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it. -- Alan Perlis
