Yes, file:list and file:children are included in version 1.0 of the EXPath spec. Looking back, an options argument for file:list (which can already have up to 3 arguments) would probably have been a better choice.

Marco Lettere m.lettere@gmail.com schrieb am Sa., 9. Nov. 2019, 18:55:

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:

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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:

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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/bbb62d1ec3e10b4fa1cc48bd4e16911fa73e46...

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