Restore 'cd ..' functionality after following a symbolic link

If I create a symbolic link in the terminal with a command like

ln -s /path/to/some/directory symbolicLink

and then follow the link with

cd symbolicLink

the terminal appears to think that the cwd is ~/symbolicLink/ even though it is actually showing ~/path/to/some/directory/ (assuming that the link was made in ~, of course). What this means is that if I then type cd .. I am taken back to ~, because the terminal 'thinks' this is the parent of the cwd.

What would I need to change such that cd .. would instead take me to ~/path/to/some/, i.e. the real parent of ~/path/to/some/directory/?

Solution 1:

See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10456784/behavior-of-cd-bash-on-symbolic-links.

You can use 'cd -P' to go to the "real" parent directory. See the first comment on the top answer on how to make this the default behavior.

Solution 2:

There's a subtle caveat in the cd -P behaviour (posted as answer because of the length):

$ dir1=$(mktemp --directory)
$ dir2=$(mktemp --directory)
$ ln -s -- "$dir1" /tmp/start
$ ln -s -- "$dir2" "$dir1"
$ cd "/tmp/start/"*
$ cd -P ..

What should pwd print now? Logically, it could be either

1. $dir1, if cd -P .. does cd .. first and cd -- "$(readlink -f)" afterwards, or
2. /tmp, if cd -P .. does cd -- "$(readlink -f)" first and cd .. afterwards.

In fact it does the latter, meaning that pwd is intuitively two levels higher than the "parent" directory.

Solution 3:

An alternative way is to run:

cd $(/bin/pwd)/..