When a find expression includes both the -type and -xtype options and a
symbolic link that points to itself is encountered (a recursive
symlink),
find fails with the error message, "Too many levels of symbolic links".
the -L option combined with the -type option also triggers the error:
find -L . -type l
One reason to use both -type and -xtype is to skip broken symbolic
links:
-type l -not -xtype l
It would be useful in this case for a symbolic link that points to
itself to be
considered broken by failing the "-xtype l" test. If the bug was
fixed without also making this adjustment, there would be no way to
exclude
symbolic links that point to themselves. One alternative would be to
introduce
a new type specifically for a symbolic link that points to itself.
Another
alternative would be to introduce some sort of meta option to pass
information
about the current file to an option. Maybe it would look like this:
-meta -lname name
--
Yorick
