I guess one could use the parent dir of a symlink if -L is not specified? but that seems a bit hacky. Therefore this just documents the behavior.
commit cb0c8ba8b2315cd0f896e79de6a6350268728949 Author: Pádraig Brady <[email protected]> Date: Fri Aug 27 08:39:48 2010 +0100 doc: document that stat -f implies -L (follows symlinks) * doc/coreutils.texi (stat invocation). Since there is no lstatfs, document that -L is implicit with -f. diff --git a/doc/coreutils.texi b/doc/coreutils.texi index d8e541c..38ef2b8 100644 --- a/doc/coreutils.texi +++ b/doc/coreutils.texi @@ -10630,6 +10630,7 @@ Without it, @command{stat} acts on any symbolic link argument directly. @cindex file systems Report information about the file systems where the given files are located instead of information about the files themselves. +This option implies the @option{-L} option. @item -c @itemx --form...@var{format}
