ls not dereferencing symlink directories by default-CodePudding

When I ls a symlink to a directory, ls just echoes the directory name.

➜  java-tutorial git:(main) ls -al
...
lrwxr-xr-x   1 josalvatorre  staff  124 Jul  9 16:17 bazel-bin -> /private/var/tmp/_bazel_josalvatorre/0614f10b8ea3a5a2198fe449cfe635ce/execroot/__main__/bazel-out/darwin_arm64-fastbuild/bin
...

➜  java-tutorial git:(main) ls /private/var/tmp/_bazel_josalvatorre/0614f10b8ea3a5a2198fe449cfe635ce/execroot/__main__/bazel-out/darwin_arm64-fastbuild/bin
ProjectRunner                    ProjectRunner.jar-0.params       ProjectRunner.jdeps              _javac
ProjectRunner-native-header.jar  ProjectRunner.jar-1.params       ProjectRunner.runfiles           external
ProjectRunner.jar                ProjectRunner.jar_manifest_proto ProjectRunner.runfiles_manifest

➜  java-tutorial git:(main) ls bazel-bin
bazel-bin

Going off memory, I'm almost certain that this is not normal behavior. It's led to unexpected behavior when I enter commands I find online. What's going on here?

I'm using zsh on an M1 Mac. I use oh-my-zsh.

Follow-Up

A few helpful people pointed out there there are dereferencing options -H and -L that do the trick. How would I make this the default behavior?

CodePudding user response：

It turned out that ls was aliasing ls -G. I just had to run unalias ls.

➜  java-tutorial git:(main) ✗ unalias ls        
➜  java-tutorial git:(main) ✗ type ls
ls is /bin/ls
➜  java-tutorial git:(main) ✗ ls bazel-bin 
ProjectRunner                           ProjectRunner.jar-1.params              ProjectRunner.runfiles_manifest         libgreeter-hjar.jdeps                   libgreeter.jar-1.params
ProjectRunner-native-header.jar         ProjectRunner.jar_manifest_proto        _javac                                  libgreeter-native-header.jar            libgreeter.jar_manifest_proto
ProjectRunner.jar                       ProjectRunner.jdeps                     external                                libgreeter.jar                          libgreeter.jdeps
ProjectRunner.jar-0.params              ProjectRunner.runfiles                  libgreeter-hjar.jar                     libgreeter.jar-0.params                 src
➜  java-tutorial git:(main) ✗ ls -G bazel-bin 
bazel-bin

As some other folks mentioned, you could also force dereferencing via -H and -L.