Hi Danny, Look at the rationale for the definition of symbolic links in section A.3 Definitions in the Rationale volume of the standard. In the 2018 edition it starts on page 3503 line 118500 and continues through the end of page 3507 at line 118685. Table A-1 and the end of the last page answers your questions about which utilities (at least those required by the standard) have options specifying how symbolic links are to be handled). I think the earlier discussion in that section answers the rest of your questions.
Note that the 2018 edition of the standard is SUSv7; not SUSv4. But I don't think that matters for this discussion as long as you really are talking about the 2018 edition of the standards. If after reading that rationale section you still have questions, feel free to post them here and we'll try to help. Hope this helps, Don > On Nov 21, 2019, at 11:47 PM, Danny Niu <danny...@hotmail.com> wrote: > > I posted a question to unix.stackexchange.com, > but answers I got so far aren't quite satisfactory, as > they are hardly backed by references. > > I hope expertized folks on this mailing list may have a > better answer for this question << EOF > > I've summarized a list of commands that accepts > symbolic link options according to SUSv4-2018ed: > > cd chgrp chown chmod cp find ln ls pax rm > > The full list also includes their defaults and > other related options supported (such as -h and -d), > and I stored it on my HDD for reference. > > I've previously seen (GNU documents if I was correct) > referring to -P -L options as "physical" and "logical" respectively, > and I think that's probably where the option letters come from, > but the latest docs as of Nov 2019 refer to them > as "--no-dereference" and "--dereference" now. > > My question is: where do -P -L -H come from? > Is it SUS, XPG, POSIX, SVID, or vendor documentation? > And what do they initially stand for? > > EOF
