"Jeff Garland" <jeff@crystalclearsoftware.com> writes:
[snip]
How about 2 symbolic links pointing at the same unmounted volume? I'm presuming that symbolic links will be followed (perhaps incorrectly) based on the first statement: "Two paths will be considered equivalent if they resolve to the same physical directory or file."
One possibility is that they are equivalent since they point at the same target. The other is that it is an error...
I would think that the default behavior should be to resolve symbolic links. To better handle symbolic links, several functions could be added, which might include is_symbolic_link, resolve_relative (or resolve_relatively), which works the same way as readlink, and resolve (or resolve_absolute or resolve_absolutely or resolve_complete), which would be equivalent to complete(resolve_relative(ph), ph). In addition, it would be useful to have a function unresolved(path) or dont_resolve(path) which returns a path wrapped such that the various functions do not resolve it if it is a symbolic link.
[snip]
-- Jeremy Maitin-Shepard