Can a file and a directory share a same path in UX?

[Henry Chua]

Hi..
Recently I discovered that a file and a directory shares the same path.. is this possible? what is the possible cause and implication?

thank you for your advise!

P.S. This thread has been moved from HP-UX Technical Documentation to HP-UX > sysadmin. -HP Forum Moderator

[Manish Srivastava]

Hi,

I think this is not possible. It can only be possible if it is a link. You can try this to check the theory:

mkdir 1
ln -s 1 1

this works but if you do ls 1
you see only the link not the directory but if you do cd 1 you can cd into the dir as 1 is a link to it.

regards,
manish

[Cheryl Griffin]

Can you show us a full listing of the file, directory? The inode would determine if the path of the directory and file are indeed exactly the same.
# ls -lai

[Scot Bean]

There are hard links and soft links. The above example is a soft link.

Directories exist as files.