coreutils: Traversing symlinks
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1 2.10 Traversing symlinks
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1 The following options modify how ‘chown’ and ‘chgrp’ traverse a
1 hierarchy when the ‘--recursive’ (‘-R’) option is also specified. If
1 more than one of the following options is specified, only the final one
1 takes effect. These options specify whether processing a symbolic link
1 to a directory entails operating on just the symbolic link or on all
1 files in the hierarchy rooted at that directory.
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1 These options are independent of ‘--dereference’ and
1 ‘--no-dereference’ (‘-h’), which control whether to modify a symlink or
1 its referent.
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1 ‘-H’
1 If ‘--recursive’ (‘-R’) is specified and a command line argument is
1 a symbolic link to a directory, traverse it.
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1 ‘-L’
1 In a recursive traversal, traverse every symbolic link to a
1 directory that is encountered.
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1 ‘-P’
1 Do not traverse any symbolic links. This is the default if none of
1 ‘-H’, ‘-L’, or ‘-P’ is specified.
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