Symbolic links

[fanf]

What happens if you try to create a symlink to a zero-length target, as in ln -s "" foo?

Linux: ENOENT.

Mac OS X 10.4: EINVAL.

FreeBSD: works, and any attempt to resolve the symlink returns ENOENT.

Solaris: works, and the resulting symlink behaves the same as ln -s . foo

Comments

[zkzkz.livejournal.com]

So in trying to justify my intuition I found what I would consider a bug in Bash -- "set -P" shouldn't change the user-visible behaviour of "cd":

$ pwd
/tmp/foo
$ cd ""
$ set -P
$ cd ""
bash: cd: : No such file or directory

But really this is caused by the same disagreement. Bash is behaving as I would expect and assuming chdir("") is a noop. But Linux apparently gives an error.

[zkzkz.livejournal.com]

(Well, except for the way it's documented to, namely the behaviour of ".." of course)

What an abomination, I wonder why I haven't turned it off yet.