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Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2007 00:31:42 +0100
From: Jilles Tjoelker <jilles@stack.nl>
To: "Julian H. Stacey" <jhs@berklix.org>
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Cc: hackers@freebsd.org, Harti Brandt <harti@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: make: evaluation of symbolic link with ../ fails
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On Tue, Nov 06, 2007 at 05:20:14PM +0100, Julian H. Stacey wrote:
> It seems to me that all except csh (including bourne shell !) are
> broken !! Amazing ! None of them cope properly actually following
> symbolic links, they all make false premise the /some_path/.. ==
> /some_path !

This may be a little confusing, but is indeed the defined POSIX
behaviour for pwd and cd.  $PWD is used to store the "logical" path
(potentially containing symlinks) that was cd'ed to.  You can avoid the
special behaviour with the -P (physical) option.  cd -P will not treat
symlinks specially and store a pathname not containing symlinks in $PWD;
pwd -P will ignore $PWD and show a pathname not containing symlinks.

A further thing to note is that csh does not have a pwd builtin (you are
supposed to use dirs or prompt substitutions apparently) and that
FreeBSD's /bin/pwd has the -P behaviour by default (you need -L to make
it use $PWD).

-- 
Jilles Tjoelker