Circular symlinks cause FTP mirroring mayhem

[John Burwell]

I'm having trouble with wget burrowing infinitely into circular 
symlinks when I don't think it's supposed to be following these 
symlinks at all.

I realize that having a link inside a directory that points back to 
that directory is problematic for many reasons, but the fact is, it 
happens, and that's beyond my control. And when it happens, wget seems 
to ignore the fact that it's a symlink and continue burrowing until the 
FTP server says "Too many symlinks." The result is several dozen 
fractal iterations of my web server directory structure, duplicated 
onto my backup target until disk space and/or RAM is exhausted on 
either the client or the server or both.

My understanding is that wget will by default *not* follow symlinks, 
but instead create a matching symlink on the local system. 
--retr-symlinks forces the following of symlinks, but I can't find an 
option to force wget not to follow symlinks.

Is there a way to force wget to just flat-out *ignore* symlinks?

Here's a look at a typical command from one of my scripts:

/sw/bin/wget --limit-rate=50k --wait=2 -b -m -nv 
-a$BAKPATH/wget_logs/$LOGNAME -P$BAKPATH -i$BAKPATH/wget_urls 
-X/Documents/Logs/

j