Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!purdue!haven!adm!smoke!gwyn
From: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Should "ls -R" traverse symlinks?
Keywords: symlink, find
Message-ID: <10502@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Date: 6 Jul 89 21:23:57 GMT
References: <12377@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 15

In article <12377@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> scs@adam.pika.mit.edu (Steve Summit) writes:
>There's no doubt that symlinks are useful, but it's discouraging
>how many propagating difficulties they introduce.  ...
>However, for good reasons or ill, it seems that nearly every
>program that calls stat(2) now wants to special-case ST_IFLNK.

Yes -- as a case in point, the BRL UNIX System V emulation for 4.nBSD
initially always traversed symlinks, because System V at the time didn't
have symlinks and the simplest emulation was to treat them transparently.
As I found problems applying the System V utilities with that behavior to
actual instances of symlinks on our systems, I gradually added more and
more special-casing, or in some cases options, to the utilities, just as
you indicated.  It's one of the things that led me to conclude that
symlinks weren't sufficiently elegant to include in the "ultimate"
operating system (whatever that may be).