On 6 Dec 2006, at 20:34, Jerry Krinock wrote: > > ...Here's something I figured out yesterday. > > Say you have a file A.txt and a symbolic link (symlink) ALink which > links to > it, at the root level of your boot drive. The data in Alink is the > string > "/A.txt". "The data in" is, if you'll excuse me saying, a poor choice of words for the path described by the symlink. From a program or user's point of view the data in Alink is whatever you see when you `cat Alink` or double-click on the symlink. > ... Say that you > cp both A.txt and ALink to a mounted Firedrive named FW. Now > doubleclick on > the copy of Alink on FW. Because the data in Alink is the string "/ > A.txt", > you will open /A.txt on your boot drive, NOT on FW. This is why one can describe symlinks by relative path. Compare: $ ls -l bar* lrwxr-xr-x 1 stroller stroller 7 Dec 8 07:02 bar -> foo.txt lrwxr-xr-x 1 stroller stroller 9 Dec 8 07:03 bar2 -> ./foo.txt lrwxr-xr-x 1 stroller stroller 23 Dec 8 07:03 bar3 -> /Users/ stroller/foo.txt $ pwd /Users/stroller $ HTH, Stroller.