Package: coreutils
Version: 5.2.1-2
Severity: normal

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The info node "ln invocation" has this example at the end:

ln -s a b ..      # creates links ../a and ../b pointing to ./a and ./b

I have tried it.  The result: ../a pointing to itself and ../b 
pointing to itself.  Such self-referencing links are totally 
useless.

I expected that the result is ../a pointing to a in the
current directory, i.e the directory in which the command was issued.
Similarly for ../b.

My general experience is that

ln -s relative/path/to/target linkname

interprets the path to target relative to the parent directory of 
linkname and not relative to the working directory.
In contrast

ln relative/path/to/file linkname

interprets the path relative to the working directory.

This difference is not documented in the info page and I find it 
confusing and unexpected.

Best wishes,

        Gabor Braun

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (650, 'testing'), (600, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.9.20041228
Locale: LANG=hu_HU.iso88592, LC_CTYPE=hu_HU.iso88592 (charmap=ISO-8859-2) 
(ignored: LC_ALL set to hu_HU.iso88592)

Versions of packages coreutils depends on:
ii  libacl1                       2.2.23-1   Access control list shared 
library
ii  libc6                         2.3.5-6    GNU C Library: Shared libraries 
an

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