fd -L omits broken symlinks

[lilyball]

It appears that fd -L completely omits any broken symlinks. Instead it should fall back to treating a broken symlink as though -L was not specified, which matches the observed find behavior.

Example:

> touch a
> ln -s b c
> ln -s a d
> exa
a  c@  d@
> find -L .
.
./a
./c
./d
> fd -L
a
d
>

Notice how fd -L completely omitted the broken c symlink. Continued:

> find -L . -type l
./c
> fd -L -t l
>

Notice how find is treating the broken symlink exactly as though -L were not specified.

This was tested with fd 7.2.0 on macOS 10.14.1 (18B75).

[sharkdp]

Thank you very much for reporting this.

Notice that you can use --show-errors to see what's happening to c:

▶ fd -L --show-errors
[fd error]: ./c: No such file or directory (os error 2)
a
d

I guess it's debatable what the result should actually be. After all, you tell fd to follow symlinks, and the target for the c symlink does not exist. It's that symlink resolving that currently leads to an error.

But I think you are probably right and we should try to follow find here.

Other opinions?

[neersighted]

This just bit me today; I agree the expected behavior is to follow find here, and just list the symlink as a direntry, if de-referencing fails.

[mqudsi]

@sharkdp remember when we comparing the results between fish's glob and fd 🙃

[sharkdp]

This has been fixed in #497. Thank you @neersighted and @tommilligan for your initial attempts. The final solution is a third approach that takes inspiration from both previous implementations.

[sharkdp]

Released in fd 7.5.0