Pardon the not-very-useful wild guess, but wasn't there a nice example program in some old Camel Book that would print out an output like
/home/mjd/foo.c
/home/mjd/bar/baz/foo.c
/home/mjd/bar-1.0/baz/foo.c
/userhomes/m/j/mjd/bar-1.0/baz/foo.c
/mnt/homevol/m/j/mjd/bar-1.0/baz/foo.c
as it progressively resolved the symlinks in higher and higher components of a path?
I thought it might have been one of those abandoned items in the Perl source eg/ directory, but I couldn't find it there, so the Camel Book was my next guess.
Addendum: This looks kinda interesting too.