ls -F Behavior

[David L. Craig]

    I'm running fileutils 4.1-10 under Debian unstable and
    noticed the treatment of the -F flag changes when used
    FILE specifications.  Given:

$ /bin/ls -l
total 4
drwxrwsr-x    2 dlc      dlc          4096 Apr 12 13:08 dir
-rw-rw-r--    1 dlc      dlc             0 Apr 12 13:08 file
lrwxrwxrwx    1 dlc      dlc             3 Apr 12 13:08 symdir -> dir
lrwxrwxrwx    1 dlc      dlc             4 Apr 12 13:08 symfile -> file


    Then:

$ /bin/ls -F
dir/  file  symdir@  symfile@

    identifies the symlinks with "@" suffixes as I
    expect, but

$ /bin/ls -Fd *
dir/  file  symdir/  symfile@

    and:

$ /bin/ls -F *
symfile@  text

dir:

symdir:

    now follow the symlink to the directory (but not the
    file) and cause me to think the type of symdir is d,
    not l.

    I cannot recall if this is changed behavior or not.
    I have used ls -F for over a decade and have never
    had my nose rubbed in this before.  Has something
    changed?  Is this POSIX-compliant behavior?

-- 

May the LORD God bless you abundantly!

Dave Craig

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"So the universe is not quite as you thought it was.
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 Because you certainly can't rearrange the universe."

--Athor 77, formulator of the       from _Nightfall_
  Universal Theory of Gravitation   by Asimov/Silverberg