Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!ames!ncar!boulder!stan!dce
From: dce@Solbourne.COM (David Elliott)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Question about ``find`` commnad
Message-ID: <1588@marvin.Solbourne.COM>
Date: 12 Jul 89 15:57:47 GMT
References: <2087@ginosko.samsung.com>
Reply-To: dce@Solbourne.com (David Elliott)
Organization: Solbourne Computer Inc., Longmont, Colorado
Lines: 25

In article <2087@ginosko.samsung.com> tikku@imposter.samsung.com (Sanjay Tikku) writes:
>The ``find`` command on our system does not follow the symbolic links which
>is also what the manual says. I thought that there was a ``-follow``
>option to make it explicitly follow the symbolic links. Our version of find
>command does not support that option though. Does anyone know if BSD
>(or any version derived from it) has any option to make it follow the
>symbolic links. Any help on this subject would be helpful.

The Tektronix UTek version of find (ca. 1985) had a -follow option.
I seem to remember that -follow had an argument to it, but I can't
remember what it's purpose would have been (maybe for following
symlinks only when they are on the same filesystem?).

There are two problems with the following of symlinks.  Sometimes,
you just don't want to, so you need to be able to turn it off,
and sometimes you only want to follow them if they are on the same
filesystem.

I definitely remember that both find and ls -R followed symlinks,
and saved a table of device/inode/hostid (for UTek's DFS) info
for every directory entered to prevent symlink loops.

-- 
David Elliott		dce@Solbourne.COM
			...!{boulder,nbires,sun}!stan!dce