chmod fails to ignore symbolic links during recursive directory transversals

[Mark Brand]

I hope I'm not making a fool of myself, but here we go:

version: coreutils-5.2.1-3.rpm (from SuSE 9.2). Linux kernel 2.6.11.1. 
reiserfs.

Quoting from the last paragraph of the DESCRIPTION chmod man page:
> However, for each symbolic link listed on the command line, chmod 
> changes the permissions of the pointed-to file.  In contrast, chmod 
> ignores symbolic links encountered during recursive directory traversals.
The 2nd sentence states that chmod ignores symbolc links during 
recursive directory traversals. The info page for chmod agrees:
> `-P'
>      Do not traverse any symbolic links.  This is the default if none
>      of `-H', `-L', or `-P' is specified.  *Note Traversing symlinks::.

The actual behavior of chmod appears to be to recursively follow 
symbolic links. To wit:

haydn:~ # mkdir sandbox
haydn:~ # cd sandbox/
haydn:~/sandbox # mkdir -p a/aa/aaa
haydn:~/sandbox # touch foo
haydn:~/sandbox # mkdir b
haydn:~/sandbox # cd a/aa/aaa/
haydn:~/sandbox/a/aa/aaa # ln -s ../../../foo foo
haydn:~/sandbox/a/aa/aaa # ln -s ../../../b b
haydn:~/sandbox/a/aa/aaa # cd ../../..
haydn:~/sandbox # ls -l
total 2
drwxr-xr-x   4 root root  120 Mar  9 10:03 .
drwx------  37 root root 2304 Mar  9 10:02 ..
drwxr-xr-x   3 root root   72 Mar  9 10:03 a
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root   48 Mar  9 10:03 b
-rw-r--r--   1 root root    0 Mar  9 10:03 foo
haydn:~/sandbox # chown -R nobody:users a
haydn:~/sandbox # ls -l
total 2
drwxr-xr-x   4 root   root   120 Mar  9 10:03 .
drwx------  37 root   root  2304 Mar  9 10:02 ..
drwxr-xr-x   3 nobody users   72 Mar  9 10:03 a
drwxr-xr-x   2 nobody users   48 Mar  9 10:03 b
-rw-r--r--   1 nobody users    0 Mar  9 10:03 foo

Moreover, there doesn't seem to be any way of invoking chmod so that it 
operates recursively on a directory tree but ignores (doesn't follow) 
symbolic links.