is it possible to treat symbolic links as actual directories when including them in PHP
<p>I have a folder that looks like this sorta</p>

<pre><code>/optik
   |- shadow
    - auth.ini
   |- htdocs
       |- index.php 
</code></pre>

<p>and I have an actual directory</p>

<pre><code>/
  |- skel
      |- include.php
</code></pre>

<p>now, i made a symbolic link shadow from skel, so what ever I put in skel will appear in the shadow folder. I did this because I have dynamic files in skel that I would be changing from time to time, so i didn't want to keep having duplicate copies of the contents of skel in each of my users folders. So I thought of making a shortcut link to it.</p>

<p>But now I was looking to see if in my index.php i could do something like this</p>

<p>index.php</p>

<pre><code>&lt;?
   include "/optik/shadow/include.php";

   // content
</code></pre>

<p>and in my include.php</p>

<pre><code>&lt;?
   include "../auth.ini";

   // some stuff with auth.ini
</code></pre>

<p>My goal is that I want to know if I can use the symbolic link like an actual dir in PHP's eyes. Since from the symbolic links perspective it would need to go up 1 directory to access auth.ini, but in the actual skel directory that file doesn't exist and I would need to specify the entire directory path to my auth.ini. But since the user folders will all differ its impossible to know what directory path to specify.</p>

<p>How can I get something like this to work?</p>
