I guessed wrong

I was browsing around my home directory this evening, using the Terminal. (Are Apple and Microsoft having a competition to see who can co-opt the most generic words?) Looking in ~/Desktop, I was pretty sure I knew how desktop folder aliases were going to work. For example, on my desktop I have an alias called Documents which points at ~/Documents.



I was confident that 'ls -l Desktop/Documents' would yield something like:

lrwxr-xr-x 1 paulh paulh 9 May 21 18:22 Documents -> 
../Documents

(That line is wrapped for readability.) That is, that Documents in ~/Desktop would be a genuine, bona fide Unix symbolic link. It's not. It's an empty file:

-rw-r--r-- 1 paulh paulh 0 May 17 22:58 Documents

What's going on here? An 'ls -al' shows a couple of possible candidates for an explanation:

-rw------- 1 paulh  paulh  6148 May 21 18:23 .DS_Store
-rw-r--r-- 1 paulh  paulh     0 May 13 14:24 .localized

Since .localized is empty, I'm looking at .DS_Store. This didn't help:

$ file .DS_Store
.DS_Store: data

Yeah, thanks file. Nor did this:

$ strings .DS_Store 
Bud1
sdilcblob
rdilcblob
sdilcblob
bdilcblob
cdilcblob
fdilcblob
DSDB

Fascinating, but not useful. Interestingly, making a symlink in ~/Desktop does do just what I thought it would:

$ ln -s ../Documents Symlink

So, what's going on? Am I close with .DS_Store? Or is the magic elsewhere?