Forwarding to the appropriate list...
-------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: bug#28079: find -type l -xtype and recursive symbolic links Resent-Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2017 16:44:01 +0000 Resent-From: Poor Yorick <org.gnu.bug-coreut...@pooryorick.com> Resent-CC: bug-coreut...@gnu.org Date: Sun, 13 Aug 2017 14:06:19 +0300 From: Poor Yorick <org.gnu.bug-coreut...@pooryorick.com> To: 28...@debbugs.gnu.org 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