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

[Geir Hauge]

2015-02-09 22:00 GMT+01:00 Cheng Rk <crquan@ymail.com>:

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

The manual has this in addition:

«Unless otherwise specified, primaries that operate on files follow symbolic links and operate on the target of the link, rather than the link itself.» 

http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#Bash-Conditional-Expressions

Probably wouldn't hurt to include that in the help text for the test builtin as well.

--

Geir Hauge