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I am receiving an error from an application I am running.

The error looks like this:

john@john-replacement:~/Desktop/yarbu-1.4.8/bin$ sudo yarbu-engine --VERBOSE
/usr/local/bin/yarbu-engine: line 996: cd: /usr/local/bin/../../etc/yarbu/conf/default: No such file or directory

What do the dots mean in /usr/local/bin/../../etc/ ?

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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jth41
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2 Answers2

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In addition to gabe's answer, which is nice:

The unix command readlink will always return the real path of a file or directory: readlink -f /usr/local/bin/../../etc/ will return /usr/etc/.

The command also resolves symbolic links. For example on my system, readlink -f /usr/bin/java returns /usr/lib/jvm/jdk-7.15-oracle-x64/jre/bin/java. Both use cases are very helpful for scripts.

Btw: .. (and also . which refers to the directory where you are) are not unix specific. The same will also work under at least all dos/windows, mac, linux/unix/bsd based operating systems.

Daniel Alder
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3

The ../ is notation for "the parent directory" so, in the case you presented:

/usr/local/bin/../../etc/yarbu/conf/default

The system will resolve that as:

/usr/etc/yarbu/conf/default

It's the same as if you were in the directory /usr/local/bin and you then typed cd .. twice, you would now be in the /usr directory.

You can verify this yourself: 

$ cd /usr/local/bin
$ pwd
/usr/local/bin
$ cd /usr/local/bin/../../../
$ pwd
/
gabe.
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    It's not the same as cd .., which sanitizes the path using realpath. If one of the path components of /usr/local/bin is a symbolic link which points somewhere else, then realpath sanitization will not point to the same directory. e.g. if /usr/local is a synlink to /opt/unspecified, /usr/local/bin/../../etc/yarbu/conf/default is resolved as /opt/etc/yarbu/conf/default, but realpath sanitizes it as /usr/etc/yarbu/conf/default. Just nitpicking here. In contrast, ls ../../etc/yarbu/conf/default while in /usr/local/bin works. – BatchyX Dec 27 '12 at 21:16
  • Good point @BatchyX it's not exactly the same... I'll update my answer to reflect that. – gabe. Jan 08 '13 at 22:21