Since we are putting out 1.7.16 soon I will make this marker issue to land the subject's commit on jruby-1_7 so we can fix this for 1.7.17. I cannot see what this logic is for. I am guessing it was something which worked pre-jnr-posix native readlink. Even then our implementation will shell out to "readlink" so I still don't know what it is for...