I see your point Christian. Thank you.

Of course recursively following the dir structure may work.

Passing a boolean to switch the behaviour with a developer choice might be viable? Or is the file:list function standardized by xquery or expath spec?

Have a nice weekend!

M.

Il sab 9 nov 2019, 18:36 Christian Grün <christian.gruen@gmail.com> ha scritto:

Hi Marco,

The rationale is that symbolic links can lead to cycles if you have
circular dependencies in your directory structure. What I learnt is
that this happens quite frequently in practice.

You can write an XQuery function with file:list and file:children,
which recursively calls itself for each directory entry. The following
function returns paths to all descendant files, excluding directories;
it should follow all symbolic links:

  declare function file:traverse($dir) {
    for $child in file:children($dir)
    return if (file:is-dir($child)) then (
      file:traverse($child)
    ) else (
      $child
    )
  };

Hope this helps,
Christian


On Wed, Nov 6, 2019 at 11:41 AM Marco Lettere <m.lettere@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Dear all,
>
> what is the rationale behind the fact that file:list has been rewritten
> to not following symbolic links [1]?
>
> We had some jobs related code that relied on symlinks and stopped
> working after moving to new version of BaseX.
>
> Is there any work around? By using children or the new descendants
> functions maybe?
>
> Thanks for your support.
>
> Marco.
>
> [1]
> https://github.com/BaseXdb/basex/blob/bbb62d1ec3e10b4fa1cc48bd4e16911fa73e46df/basex-core/src/main/java/org/basex/query/func/file/FileList.java#L103
>