find(1)'s "newer" primary expression gives wrong results with symbolic links

Harry Schmalzbauer freebsd at omnilan.de
Sat Sep 30 12:53:08 UTC 2017



Hello,

utilizing find(1)'s 'newer' primary expression is broken with symbolic links (for a very long time).

Anyone who is using find for timestamp comparings should pay special attention regarding symbolic links.
The man page states for "-P" (which ist the default), that »the file information and file type (see stat(2)) returned for each symbolic link to be those of the link itself«

That's not the case, -P doesn't work as expected, see
https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=222698
for details.
Hope someone with better C skills will find the root of the problem as soon as possible.  I'm trying to find myself, but I'm happyly proven not to be the fastest ;-)

-harry



More information about the freebsd-stable mailing list