cd

Do you know cd ? I thought I did until this afternoon …

OK, let’s start some basic.

I create two directories
$ echo $SHELL
/bin/ksh
$ mkdir /tmp/foo
$ mkdir /tmp/bar

create a symlink /tmp/bar/baz pointing to /tmp/foo
$ ln -s /tmp/foo /tmp/bar/baz


create a file foo1 in foo
$ touch /tmp/foo/foo1


change to the symbolic link baz
$ cd /tmp/bar/baz


Ok, so far so good. Let’s check what is in ../foo
$ ls ../foo
foo1

From the symbolic baz, .. point to /tmp/foo. This is because ls and most command line utilities use the physical path.

To print the Logical [default] and Physical working directories, use pwd -L and pwd -P
$ pwd -L
/tmp/bar/baz
$ pwd -P
/tmp/foo

to change directory relatively to the logical path, use cd -L … (default), for physical, use cd -P … !
$ pwd -L
/tmp/bar/baz
$ cd -L ../foo
ksh: ../foo: not found
Obviously /tmp/bar/foo does not exist

$ pwd -L
/tmp/bar/baz
$ pwd -P
/tmp/foo
$ cd -P ../foo
$ pwd
/tmp/foo
Obviously /tmp/foo/../foo is /tmp/foo

So far so good, some of you may know that already.

Let’s bring some devil element in play
$ bash


Arghh!!! Ôôôôôôôôôôôôôô râge, Ôôôôôôôôôôôôôô désespoir, I switched to a non-working shell!

$ cd /tmp/bar/baz
$ cd -L ../foo
$ pwd -L
/tmp/foo

Even if I switched to a not working directory, bash cd -L weirdly decided to switch to the physical path instead of the logical path.

Let’s retry
$ cd /tmp/bar/baz
$ mkdir /tmp/bar/foo
$ cd -L ../foo
$ pwd
/tmp/bar/foo

This time bash cd -L changed to the logical path. So if you use bash and cd, you cannot possibly know where you are landing without checking first if the directory exist !

BTW, I just discovered Digger HD , unrelated to this post of course …