How to make Ruby's Find.find follow symlinks?

Question

I have a file hierarchy and some of the sub-directories are relative symlinks. I am using Ruby's Find.find to crawl through these dirs and find some specific files. However it's not looking into any directory which is a symlink (it follows files which are symlinks).

Looking at the source code it seems the problem is because it's using File.lstat(file).directory? to test if something is a directory. This returns false for symlinks but File.stat.directory? returns true.

How can I make Find.find follow symlinks, short of monkey patching it to use File.stat instead of File.lstat?

Answer 1

I came across the similar situation and decided to follow the real path without extra gem.

require 'find'

paths = ARGV

search_dirs = paths.dup
found_files = Array.new

until search_dirs.size == 0
  Find.find( search_dirs.shift ) do |path|
    if File.directory?( path ) && File.symlink?( path )
      search_dirs << File.realdirpath( path )
    else
      found_files << path
    end
  end
end

puts found_files.join("\n")

This way can't keep the original path with symbolic link but is fine for me at the moment.