navigating symbolic links in shell

tomViolet · 09-20-2011, 03:59 AM

Hi all, when there is symbolic link of a directory on my filesystem and I cd myself in it using csh on xterm, navigating back using 'cd ..' gets me to the physical working directory of the symbolic link and not the directory I was previously in.

Is there any way to default the behaviour of cd so that directory traversal works ignoring the physical working directory of symbolic links?

Thank you in advance.

igadoter · 09-20-2011, 04:41 AM

Hi, don't think it is possible at all. Can be many symbolic links pointing to the same directory. You can to jump using 'pushd' and 'popd' commands.

Code:

$ pwd
/home/piotr/.kde
$ pushd ./ 
~/.kde ~/.kde
$ cd ~/
$ pwd
/home/piotr
$ popd
~/.kde
$ pwd
/home/piotr/.kde

David the H. · 09-20-2011, 04:41 PM

. and .. are not just shortcuts of some kind, they're actual physical directory names existing in your file tree. . is defined at the file system level to always refer to the current physical working directory, and .. always refers to the parent of the current directory.

I don't know about csh, but bash, for example, sets an OLDPWD environment variable that holds the last directory you were in. Then you can use "cd -" as a synonym for "cd $OLDPWD". This is in addition to popd/pushd.

So check your shell documentation.