I don't know if this is the correct behavior. Whether or not a symlink to a directory has its contents shown with GNU ls depends on whether or not there's a slash present and the flags used:
playground$ mkdir AFolder playground$ touch AFolder/Horse playground$ ln -s AFolder SymbolicLinkToAFolder playground$ ls SymbolicLinkToAFolder Horse playground$ ls -l SymbolicLinkToAFolder lrwxrwxrwx 1 ericpruitt ericpruitt 7 Dec 7 15:35 SymbolicLinkToAFolder -> AFolder playground$ ls -l SymbolicLinkToAFolder/ total 0 -rw------- 1 ericpruitt ericpruitt 0 Dec 7 15:34 Horse Personally, that "-l" made a difference surprised me, but prior to actually running the command, I would expect "ls ... $SYMLINK" to show the information for the symlink while "ls ... $SYMLINK/" to show the contents of the directory. If I recall correctly, historically in things like Sys V, whether or not a trailing slash was added to a directory used as a command line argument changed the behaviour of various tools. Check out http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/50522 which has a few links to the POSIX docs. Eric