changing directory problem with symbolic link in csh

[robin99]

Hi All.

My S/W developers are using C Shell in HP-UX 11.11.

One of them asked me about changing directory.

For example,

1) The current directory and result of "ls -al" are :

$pwd
/apl1/apl_sw/wsm.ss

$ls -al
lrwxrwxrwx 1 ypark bksuser 42 Mar 3 10:25 test -> /export/bks/wsm/test

2) He changed directory into test :

$cd test
$pwd
/export/bks/wsm/test

3) He tried to return the previous directory, but couldn't :

$cd ..
$pwd
/export/bks/wsm

I guess that it's csh's problem.

Is there anyone who solve it?

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom

Make sure the shell patches for Posix, csh and ksh are installed.

Patch database http://itrc.hp.com

SEP

[Steven Schweda]

Perhaps I'm the one who's confused, but I
thought that "cd .." meant "go up one level
in the directory hierarchy", not "go back to
wherever I was before". "/export/bks/wsm" is
up one level from "/export/bks/wsm/test", so
it's working as I'd expect it to work.

> I guess that it's csh's problem.

That's one way to look at it.

If you want a way to return to a previous
directory, you might investigate pushd and
popd. "man csh".

[OldSchool · Accepted solution]

from the man page as well:
"Relative path changes (such as cd ..), when in a symbolically linked directory, cause csh's knowledge of the working directory to be along the symbolic path instead of the physical path."

I read that as saying it should work as Robin99's developers appear to desire. However, in checking, I found the following:

AIX csh goes up the actual path, not the symbolic link. ksh goes back up the sym-link

Linux csh goes back up the symlink

HP-UX 11.0 - csh goes back up the actual path, not the symlink, ksh goes back up the symlink

of course, I'd question why developers "need" the csh....

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi:

If your developer's are bent on using 'csh' I would install 'tcsh' instead:

http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Shells/tcsh-6.14.06/

I would also suggest reading:

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/shell/csh-whynot/

Regards!

...JRF...

[Dennis Handly]

>OldSchool: ksh goes back up the symlink
>I'd question why developers "need" the csh.

Right a real shell works fine, not the scummy csh.
Also, the pwd command will tell you the logical name by default. If you want the physical path, you need "pwd -P".

Also with a real shell, you can use "cd -".

[robin99]

Thank you very much for your helps.

Frankly speeking, I don't find how to change working directory instead of physical directory.

But my developer decided to use ksh.

[Dennis Handly]

>I don't find how to change working directory instead of physical directory.

csh thinks they are the same. sh/ksh has the concept of logical or physical path.

>But my developer decided to use ksh.

That's always a good idea. Either sh or ksh.