Re: Surprising behavior of Cwd module on Unix with symlinks


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Re: Surprising behavior of Cwd module on Unix with symlinks

by DrHyde (Prior)

on Feb 08, 2011 at 11:03 UTC ( [id://886920]=note: print w/replies, xml )

Need Help??

in reply to Surprising behavior of Cwd module on Unix with symlinks

FindBin will do what you want:

$ ls -l symlink
lrwxrwxrwx 1 david david 22 2011-02-08 10:54 symlink -> foo/bar
$ cd symlink
$ pwd
/home/david/symlink
$ ls -l ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 david david 4096 2011-02-08 10:54 bar
[download]

Note that ls shows us the contents of the parent of the *real* directory that we're in, not the contents of the directory containing the symlink. Symlinks are a bit weird.

$ perl -MFindBin -e 'print "$FindBin::Bin\n"'
/home/david/foo/bar
[download]

FindBin correctly resolves it, giving us the full path to the directory.

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Re^2: Surprising behavior of Cwd module on Unix with symlinks
by Anonyrnous Monk (Hermit) on Feb 08, 2011 at 12:26 UTC

FindBin correctly resolves it, giving us the full path to the directory.

As far as I understand, the OP wants the opposite, i.e. the respective symlink path being returned (/home/david/symlink in your case), not the target of the symlink, which is more generally aka realpath, and is easier to determine.

As ikegami pointed out, some other process (usually the shell) needs to keep track of the chdir history to be able to provide the info the OP wants.

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