coreutils: Traversing symlinks
2.10 Traversing symlinks
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The following options modify how ‘chown’ and ‘chgrp’ traverse a
hierarchy when the ‘--recursive’ (‘-R’) option is also specified. If
more than one of the following options is specified, only the final one
takes effect. These options specify whether processing a symbolic link
to a directory entails operating on just the symbolic link or on all
files in the hierarchy rooted at that directory.
These options are independent of ‘--dereference’ and
‘--no-dereference’ (‘-h’), which control whether to modify a symlink or
its referent.
‘-H’
If ‘--recursive’ (‘-R’) is specified and a command line argument is
a symbolic link to a directory, traverse it.
‘-L’
In a recursive traversal, traverse every symbolic link to a
directory that is encountered.
‘-P’
Do not traverse any symbolic links. This is the default if none of
‘-H’, ‘-L’, or ‘-P’ is specified.