Re: NON-trivial regular expression problem (could not find on google)

[Dr. Yuan Liu]

Peter J. Acklam wrote:
> democrat@india.com (Instant Democracy) wrote:
> > The task is to eliminate patterns such as 
> >    DIRNAME/../
> > from the path because they are redundant.
>
> Are they really?  If DIRNAME is a symlink, then there is no
> guarantee that these two point to the same place:
>
>    foo/bar/..
>    foo
>
> You *must* ensure that DIRNAME is not a symlink before you
> simplify the pathnames like this.

This seems to depend on the shell.  Only C-ish shells will turn symlinks 
into real path and cause a problem.  Bournish and Kornish shells all 
stick with the symbolic path, i.e., foo/bar/.. is always foo.

Yuan Liu