http://qs1969.pair.com?node_id=331667

z3d has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Looking for some answers to my "HUH?!?" of the day. I have a script (don't we all?) that needs to perform an action on some files/directories. No biggie. But what I've found is that if there are symlinks in the tree, it performs them against the symlink targets. For instance, say i have /tmp/mike/cat, symlinked to /tmp/dogfood. It seems that perl (5.6.1 and 5.8.2, tested both) will return true on both the -l and the -d tests when scanning /tmp/mike and hitting cat. Is this just a quirk of perl? (Would expect perl to say it's either a dir or a sym, not evaluate both the source and the target). I can explain better if needed, hate posting this, but it *seems* like a bug in the implimentation of the stat tests.



"I have never written bad code. There are merely unanticipated features."