Ny relationship between linking binaries and symbolic links

You could use the symlinks command to convert absolute paths to relative:

/tmp$ mkdir -p 1/{a,b,c} 2
/tmp$ cd 2
/tmp/2$ ln -s /tmp/1/* .
/tmp/2$ ls -l
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 stephane stephane 8 Jul 31 16:32 a -> /tmp/1/a/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 stephane stephane 8 Jul 31 16:32 b -> /tmp/1/b/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 stephane stephane 8 Jul 31 16:32 c -> /tmp/1/c/

We've got absolute links, let's convert them to relative:

/tmp/2$ symlinks -cr .
absolute: /tmp/2/a -> /tmp/1/a
changed:  /tmp/2/a -> ../1/a
absolute: /tmp/2/b -> /tmp/1/b
changed:  /tmp/2/b -> ../1/b
absolute: /tmp/2/c -> /tmp/1/c
changed:  /tmp/2/c -> ../1/c
/tmp/2$ ls -l
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 stephane stephane 6 Jul 31 16:32 a -> ../1/a/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 stephane stephane 6 Jul 31 16:32 b -> ../1/b/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 stephane stephane 6 Jul 31 16:32 c -> ../1/c/

References

• symlinks man page

POSIX requires this behaviour for files of certain types on the system call level. The open function follows symbolic links, except if the O_NOFOLLOW flag is set – which hexedit most probably does not do.

For directories, the read function shall return an error code and set errno to EISDIR. From http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/read.html:

The fildes argument refers to a directory and the implementation does not allow the directory to be read using read() or pread(). The readdir() function should be used instead.

As @goldilocks suggested, there are 7 different file types at least, each with different semantics:

• regular files
• symbolic links
• directories
• block devices
• character devices
• FIFOs and
• sockets