Jesper Juhl writes:

Let's see what procfs reports:
  [root@arch ~]# ls -l /proc/$$/exe
  lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Jul 23 19:58 /proc/884/exe -> /bin/bash
Doesn't seem quite right....

That's because it looks like a symlink, it feels like a symlink, but it's  
not really a symlink.

So, from my point of view it looks like procfs is the one who has got it
wrong.
We should probably fix that (IMVHO).

If you remove a running process's executable, that "symlink" will now read  
"$filename (deleted)".

Surprisingly, you will be able to open(2) this alleged "symlink".