Should find traverse symbolic links?

[Bakul Shah]

In article <15319 at smoke.brl.mil> gwyn at smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn) writes:
>In article <1991Feb25.130613.2553 at phri.nyu.edu> roy at 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.

Indeed.  It would be nice if all tree traversal programs used a
common set of options for tree related choices such as crossing
mount points, following sym-links, descending trees, etc.  (with
appropriate defaults).  Not likely to happen for most existing
programs due to compatibility reasons but how about defining such
a set for new programs and extending old ones (if there is no
conflict)?

Suggestion:

	-x      (do/don't) cross mount points
	-L      (do/don't) follow  symLinks
	-R      (do/don't) descend (Recurse) trees

I'd also like a similar set for turning *on* options so that
regardless of defaults one can specify an exact behavior.  If
people don't like options that start with a +, how about -<option>
to turn *on* <option> and -/<option> to turn it *off*?

No illusions though.

-- Bakul Shah
   bvs at BitBlocks.COM
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