[Feature] Don't follow symbolic links

[simsong]

Converted from SourceForge issue 2308881, submitted by jessekornblum

Can you include a new command line option to exclude traversal of symbolic/hardlinks: sth. like '--no-links-followed'

This way moved/backuped data can be properly compared, even when relative directory paths are given in links. Currently the moved/backuped files show a broken destination and the comparison fails.

Using '-o bcpfsd' is not possible, because links should be digested also, but not followed.

Why was this closed? Seems like a good feature. Verify symbolic links, but don't follow.

[simsong]

Sure. Will you implement it?

[JDLH]

Sure. Will you implement it?

It looks like s-d-adams implemented this feature in their fork of hashdeep back in 2018, and offers this fix back here to main hashdeep as PR #382. That PR is still open, awaiting a response.

I am presently using sha256deep on macOS Sonoma 14.7.1, and it is covering way more files than I intended because it is following symlinks. I would really benefit from having the proposed -R flag. I am glad to have sha256deep, so thank you for your work to develop it, but I would be even more glad to have this feature.

[simsong]

It looks like I need to implement GitHub actions on this repo so that we can test and validate pull request before accepting them.

If you want to do a pool request that implements GitHub Actions, I'll take a look at it. Otherwise, I'll add that to my things to do list.