Problem with recursive searches.

[Michael ODonnell]

>>I suspect find's symlink dereferencing behavior, so here's a
>>shot in the dark: try toggling your dereference option, ie.
>>if you're telling find to dereference symlinks, try the same
>>search but don't dereference.  If you aren't, then do so...
>
> Kudos.  "find -follow" works like a charm.

Cool, though this hardly counts as a general solution, since
the results obtained with -follow may not be what's wanted.


> Except:
> I'm just kind of puzzled; the directory has no symlinks (or links
> of any other type) in it.  Nor does /.  Any idea why de-referencing
> symlinks -- that, as far as I can tell, it hasn't looked at -- would
> cause this?  Is this a filesystem issue, perhaps?  (I'm using XFS,
> but I've used it before without issue.)

I came up with my hypothesis by having a peek at the
sources - I noticed that find's return-to-parent-directory
behavior during recursive descents was directly affected
by whether the -follow option had been selected and,
as you noticed, independent of whether any symlinks had
been processed.  I'd have to think about this a bit more
before declaring this behavior to be a bug, but it sure
does smell like one...