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Could someone please explain this to me? I'm having trouble understanding how this is set up and why it behaves the way it does.

I wanted to see where zsh is actually installed on a machine that I use. So I used ls to find where the symlink points.

$ ls -l /bin/zsh lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 Dec 1 2011 /bin/zsh -> ../sfw/bin/zsh*

When I saw this, I thought, "Okay, the symlink uses a relative path. No big deal."

But if I then try to cd directly to what should be where the relative path points, I get this:

$ cd /bin/sfw/bin cd: no such file or directory: /bin/sfw/bin

However, if I specifically type this

$ cd ../sfw/bin

when /bin is the working directory, then it works. And then I also get this:

$ pwd /usr/sfw/bin

What is going on here?

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/bin is probably a symlink to /usr/bin on your system. If that were true then:

/bin/../sfw/bin/zsh

would actually be the same as

/usr/bin/../sfw/bin/zsh

which reduces to

/usr/sfw/bin/zsh

which is where zsh actually lives. Note that what you tried, which was

/bin/sfw/bin

does not correspond to any path that you actually could see on the system. The correct way to resolve a relative path (../sfw/bin/zsh) given the absolute path path that forms the base for that relative path (/bin) is to concatenate them together as /bin/ + ../sfw/bin/zsh → /bin/../sfw/bin/zsh.

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