design problem in 'diff -r' comparing 2 trees.

[L A Walsh]

Problem I'm running into is comparing two copies of tree that also
contains multiple symlinks.

First -- I see no way of telling diff not to follow symlinks in
doing comparisons.  This seems non-standard for unix/linux utils and in
this case is causing alot of needless comparing like

trying to compare 'bin' and 'wbin' in my home dir. 

under bin, is a lib directory.  Additionally some small projects
also have their own directory under bin, but have a symlink
../lib to get access to library files.

Already, I'm getting multiple compares on the subtree 'lib' -- many
of which are generating errors as loops like
bin/prog/lib/bin <- may not exist if bin is a symlink pointing to the
parent bin......etc.  needless to say, it is a mess.

Instead of the couple of files I expected to find different,
I'm ending up with a 250K file of diffs -- most of which
are bogus compares.

So how do I prevent diff from following symlinks - and more usefully,
maybe compare the contents of such symlinks (i.e. most of them
are relative and should be the same between the two trees being compared).

Am I missing a switch to not follow symlinks?
Seems so basic, its hard to believe it wouldn't already be there....(?)

Thanks
-l