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  • However, some software might use a socket or link of some odd type named .config ... Commented Apr 9, 2018 at 2:12
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    @rackandboneman stat from GNU coreutils on my system happily reports a socket as a socket. Symlinks are reported as symbolic link. Hardlinks are indistinguishable from "regular" files and are reported as regular file (that's what they are, after all), except that the links count is >1. Commented Apr 9, 2018 at 9:29
  • "of some odd type" - I was referring to the other dozens of sockety or linky types found in that super-verbose section of C code (there certainly is a good reason for not just indexing an array of strings with the file type number ... I guess...) :) Commented Apr 9, 2018 at 12:55
  • @rackandboneman Base POSIX doesn't provide any way to extract a "file type number" from a stat structure, only the S_ISxxx() macros. Some Unixes offer a set of "XSI" extensions that include a way to do that, but coreutils tries not to depend on XSI, or did the last time I looked anyway. Commented Apr 12, 2018 at 14:46
  • Ahhh OK. I was kind of mis-assuming coreutils to be more GNU/linux centric that it is meant to be :) Commented Apr 12, 2018 at 18:40