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From: gwyn@smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Should find traverse symbolic links?
Message-ID: <15319@smoke.brl.mil>
Date: 25 Feb 91 17:16:05 GMT
References: <1991Feb25.130613.2553@phri.nyu.edu>
Organization: U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, APG, MD.
Lines: 15

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.

The fundamental problem is that there is no single "right" method of
handling symbolic links.  Sometimes one wants them to be truly
transparent, and other times one wants to notice that they are symlinks.

I could tell you stories about my attempts to decide upon appropriate
default behavior for this in utilities such as "find" that I adapted
to work in environments supporting symlinks, but there isn't much
point to doing so.  The bottom line is that symlinks don't fit very
well into UNIX's idea of hierarchical filesystem structure, and older
utilities were not designed to provide reasonable options for coping
with them.


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