Gnome-terminal follows symbolic links instead of staying in the current directory when opening a new tab

[Anonym25712]

Binary package hint: gnome-terminal

1) cd /tmp
2) mkdir -p A/AA
3) mkdir B
4) cd B
5) ln -s ../A/AA
6) cd AA

The current directory is /tmp/B/AA. Open a new tab, you're now in /tmp/A/AA.

[Anonym25712 (anonym25712)]

This happens all the time to me, because in my job I write a lot of research papers, all of them being in a Subversion repository. Since I like to use a different hierarchy than the other people I'm working with, I've got a separate directory with many symbolic links, organized in a different way (I store them by year). Each time I open a new tab, I'm back in the SVN repository. That's quite annoying.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

confirming, seems to be a problem only with gnome-terminal, terminator and xterm works fine.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

that's issue C in bug http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=502146 ; according to the upstream authors is not possible to fix that, can you comment on that report if you're interested on it? thanks.

[Anonym25712 (anonym25712)]

I've added a comment, thanks for the link.

[Rob Parker (rfdparker)]

I can confirm this is still an issue in Ubuntu 12.04[.3] with the current gnome-terminal 3.4.1.1-0ubuntu1 package.

Are there any plans for this to be fixed in 12.04?

[Marc Deslauriers (mdeslaur)]

Possible commits:

https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-terminal/commit/?id=ecdcbb9c55ba385aee5a01ca3e95c910162e0249
https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-terminal/commit/?id=760fbbd9340dac63b29436a3de411053456c8d2d
https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-terminal/commit/?id=3e57ba80b0e1f30f1fa060201abde6a64a8f656e
https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-terminal/commit/?id=b45b1f8be2c44d41a18186e0b5859c32bc00c1c2

[Marius Gedminas (mgedmin)]

This is still a problem in Ubuntu 17.10, if your shell doesn't use OSC 7 to inform gnome-terminal about the current working directory.

In theory /etc/profile.d/vte-2.91.sh should set it up automatically, but for some reason that doesn't happen for me. I think that reason is because in Ubuntu gnome-terminal doesn't launch login shells by default, and thus /etc/profile is ignored.

I don't know why the commits from 2012 that are supposed to check $PWD do not work any more. Perhaps a newer version removed them, when the OSC 7 was deemed to be the correct solution?

[Marius Gedminas (mgedmin)]

I've just noticed that Debian carries a patch for reading the working directory from /proc if OSC 7 was not in use. This patch doesn't have the "let's look for $PWD in the environment" logic that was supposed to fix this bug.

See https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=712628