site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: darwin-dev@lists.apple.com On Sep 19, 2006, at 7:24 PM, Justin C. Walker wrote: On Sep 19, 2006, at 19:12 , Steve Checkoway wrote: $ ls -l foop lrwxr-xr-x 1 justin wheel 9 Sep 19 18:59 foop -> /tmp/goop you see the *file information* for the linked-to file, as in $ ls -lL foop -rw-r--r-- 1 justin wheel 7 Sep 19 18:59 foop -- Steve Checkoway _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Darwin-dev mailing list (Darwin-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/darwin-dev/site_archiver%40lists.appl... This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com I think the issue is that this behavior seems to contradict what the man page says: -L If argument is a symbolic link, list the file or directory the link references rather than the link itself. This option cancels the -P option. I think if you read that correctly (i.e., the way I do :-}), it says that instead of seeing the *file information* for the symlink, as in I read it as saying that if the argument is a symlink (as is foop below), then it will list the file or directory the link references (goop in this case), rather than the link itself. I'm not sure how else to read that. In this case, it's showing the metadata of goop as being the metadata of foop and not even showing that foop is a symlink. This seems even worse. The file information in Unix file systems is divorced from the file name. Well, I'm not using UFS here, but I know what you're saying. I'm really not sure how you managed to read the man page in that way. Keep in mind, I quote the BSD man page, not the GNU man page (of which I seem to have two different versions) which does mention file information. smime.p7s