Should find traverse symbolic links?

Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR allbery at NCoast.ORG
Sun Mar 3 10:33:00 AEST 1991


As quoted from <BZS.91Feb26172744 at world.std.com> by bzs at world.std.com (Barry Shein):
+---------------
| Seems to me that find needs a flag which instructs it to follow
| symlinks and leave it to the user whether this is a good idea or not.
| It should be off by default, analogous to "ls"s -L flag (on BSD
| systems.)
| 
| For now you could probably kludge it with a "-type l" and -exec of
| another find on the real path if it's a dir, but i'll fully admit
| that's ugly and hairy.
+---------------

The Altos systems at work (aside from the 5000, which runs SCO Pseudnix and
therefore doesn't have symlinks... d*mmit) have a "find" which understands the
"-nosym" option.  It prevents traversal of symlinks --- the opposite of what
you're asking for.

It's notable that I don't use -nosym often, except for cpio backups.  That
means I use it about one day a week, and ignore the option the other 4 work
days....

++Brandon
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