Traversing symlinks (GNU Coreutils 9.0)
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2.10 Traversing symlinks
The following options modify how chown
and chgrp
traverse a hierarchy when the --recursive
(-R
) option is also specified. If more than one of the following options is specified, only the final one takes effect. These options specify whether processing a symbolic link to a directory entails operating on just the symbolic link or on all files in the hierarchy rooted at that directory.
These options are independent of --dereference
and --no-dereference
(-h
), which control whether to modify a symlink or its referent.
- ‘
-H
’ If
--recursive
(-R
) is specified and a command line argument is a symbolic link to a directory, traverse it.- ‘
-L
’ In a recursive traversal, traverse every symbolic link to a directory that is encountered.
- ‘
-P
’ Do not traverse any symbolic links. This is the default if none of
-H
,-L
, or-P
is specified.