"John R. Vanderpool" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > this will probably be considered a non-bug (because the same behavior > exists in bash, ksh, pdksh, irix, and gnu coreutils!) but i'ld at least > like to hear an explanation if possible.
It's longstanding tradition that "test -e foo" should fail on a dangling symlink. It's also a requirement of POSIX; see <http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/utilities/test.html>. You can use "test -e FOO || test -h FOO" if you want to test for either a file or a dangling symlink. Admittedly this is less efficient than you might like, if for some reason (e.g., a network file system, or a slow device) stat calls are very expensive. If you want a nonstandard extension that just issues an lstat system call and nothing else, you can use "stat -c '' FOO 2>/dev/null" (recent coreutils versions only) to test whether FOO exists either as a file or a dangling symlink, without following any symlinks. _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
