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From: rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Should find traverse symbolic links?
Message-ID: <1991Feb25.143543.4213@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Date: 25 Feb 91 14:35:43 GMT
References: <1991Feb25.130613.2553@phri.nyu.edu>
Organization: Northern Illinois University
Lines: 26

In article <1991Feb25.130613.2553@phri.nyu.edu> roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) writes:
>	I was surprised to observe today that if you do "find dir ..." and
>dir is a symbolic link to a directory, the directory isn't entered.  Thus:
>alanine> 
>
>	This seems to me to be The Wrong Thing.  Is it a bug in find, or
>was it really intended to work that way?  I get the same results on MtXinu

 Now just imagine I run a script overnight to remove stale core files.

 Naturally I use something like:

       find . -atime +7 -name core -exec rm \{\} \;

 But, unbeknowns to me, some user has done the following:

	ln -s / root

 If find followed symbolic links, how long do you think it would take this
script to complete its execution?

-- 
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  Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science               <rickert@cs.niu.edu>
  Northern Illinois Univ.
  DeKalb, IL 60115                                   +1-815-753-6940


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