Suppose I have a symlink /path/to/symlink that points to a directory /path/to/dir. In a python codebase I was looking at, it writes some file to the real path like below:

import os

symlink_path = '/path/to/symlink'
target_path = os.path.realpath(symlink_path)
file_path = os.path.join(target_path, "file.txt")
with open(file_path, 'w'):
  # write some stuff

I don’t understand why the realpath is needed here. Why can’t we simply do

import os

symlink_path = '/path/to/symlink'
file_path = os.path.join(symlink_path, "file.txt")
with open(file_path, 'w'):
  # write some stuff

and not worry about the realpath?