Re: Fwd: bug#28079: find -type l -xtype and recursive symbolic links

[Dale R. Worley]

The problem is that the property "a symbolic link that points to itself"
actually isn't related to any of the properties that find's predicates
test.  (Other than that it has to be a symbolic link, trivially.)  It's
also messier than that phrasing says, since the link could point to
*another* link, which points back to the first, etc.

I haven't looked into the code, but it seems that the processing of the
"Too many levels of symbolic links" error when evaluating -xtype is not
trivial.  It seems that you're intrested in a predicate which means
"attempting to follow the link will return the error 'Too many levels of
symbolic links'".

Interestingly, the predicate "symbolic link that cannot be resolved to a
file" *can* be tested, as "-type l -xtype l" -- if a symbolic link is
"broken", -xtype tests it as a link.

Dale