Re: Does [ -f FILE ] have a bug on testing a symlink ?

[Ken Irving]

On Mon, Feb 09, 2015 at 09:00:12PM +0000, Cheng Rk wrote:
> 
> To bug-bash@gnu.org:
> 
> According this documentation `help test`, I am expecting it should
> return false on anything other than a regular file,
> 
> -f FILE        True if file exists and is a regular file.
> 
> but why it returned true on a symlink to a regular file?
> 
> $ [ -f tmp/sym-link ] && echo true
> true

Symlinks are transparent for most purposes, and in your case the test
is against the file pointed to by the symlink.  If you want to test the
symlink itself you can use the -h or -L test operators.