I am working on a mathematical description of paths (such as filepaths, but also more abstract and general)One of the most tricky things to define is the behavour of .. ( in the linked post); particularly with how it interacts with symlinks.I want to check that for it that I understand the POSIX rules correctly.POSIX 4.14 saysWhen a process resolves a pathname of an existing directory entry, the entire pathname shall be resolved as described below. When a process resolves a pathname of a directory entry that is to be created immediately after the pathname is resolved, pathname resolution terminates when all components of the path prefix of the last component have been resolved. It is then the responsibility of the process to create the final component. ...  Each filename in the pathname is located in the directory specified by its predecessor (for example, in the pathname fragment a/b, file b is located in directory a).  ...  If a symbolic link is encountered during pathname resolution, ...   the system shall prefix the remaining pathname, if any, with the contents of the symbolic link ...  the resolved pathname shall be the resolution of the pathname just created. If the resulting pathname does not begin with a , the predecessor of the first filename of the pathname is taken to be the directory containing the symbolic link.  The special filename dot shall refer to the directory specified by its predecessor. The special filename dot-dot shall refer to the parent directory of its predecessor directory. As a special case, in the root directory, dot-dot may refer to the root directory itself. ..So what I understand is POSIX says is that symlinks should expanded before resolving .. to go to the parent directory.Is this correct?So for normalising paths, the POSIX compliant way is the behaviour of realpath -Pwhich is to require existence of all directories (but not the final file component), and to expand resolve symlinks from left to right (as soon as encountered), and then apply ..Which is to say the file system has to be read at all steps of processing a path.We can contrast this to the behaviour of node.js's Path.normalize (or even it's Path.posix.normalize) -- which I think is fairly normal in many programming langauges (Python2 and 3 os.path are similar).Which is equivalent to realpath -s -m, which is to say it completely ignores that some directories may be simlinks, or may not exist.Which is nice since it does not have to touch the file system at all.If we than take a path that has been normalised this way,and give it to a function that does touch the file system (Eg fs.readFile)Then it is equivalent to if we had normalized the path using realpath -L,which is to Resolve .. before symlinksBash cd also acts as though it has processed it argument with realpath -L unless you give it the -P flagAm I correctly understanding the POSIX spec, and its relation to realpath, and to many (most?) programming language path libraries?Bonus question :-P, anyone got an example of a programming languages/libraries (other than using shell utilities like realpath) that has a POSIX compliant implementation of normalize?(I believe Python 3 pathlib.Path.resolve is correct. Though it also converts relative paths to absolute paths.)
Am I correct in my understanding of how symlinks and `..` interact under POSIX
symlink;filenames;posix