ls operation changed

[Vidiot <brown mrvideo vidiot com>]

I've been noticing this for a while now and it is damn annoying.  The ls
command traverses symbolic links if the symbolic link is used as the filename
given to ls.  For example, if I do:

	ls -laG sym_filename

and sym_filename points to a directory named /usr/symlinkname, the contents
of /usr/symlinkname is displayed instead of displaying

lrwxrwxrwx    1 brown         16 Sep 15 02:24 sym_filename -> /usr/symlinkname

What the Hell does it take to get ls to do this right?  Under Solaris it
is displayed as expected.  If one wants to see the contents of the pointed
to link, a "/." is added to the end of the filename (sym_filename/.).  For
some reason, under Linux, ls acts as if the "/." is always appended to
the end of the file name.  I do not see an option for telling ls not to
traverse the symbolic link.

While it is true that doing a "ls -laG" will show the symbolic link, if there
are hundreds of entries, one has to manually parse through that list to find
the desired entry or pipe the results through grep.  That defeats the whole
purpose of ls.

Whose brilliant idea was it to change the behavior of ls after all these years?
Or is the RH 7.1 version broken?

Thanks for any pointers in getting the old, and correct, behavior working
again.

MB
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