Question

What’s the differences between /home/zzz and /home/zzz/ when used in bash?

I just found that when /home/zzz is a link to another dir, find /home/zzz -type f will get nothing, but find /home/zzz/ -type f will return all files under that dir. I think bash treat /home/zzz a link type file, but /home/zzz/ a dir in this case.

Is there any other differences?

Answer 1

The trailing slash is interpreted by most Unix utilities (find in this case) to mean “follow the symlink”.

From the POSIX Symbolic Link Specification:

When the final component of a pathname is a symbolic link, the
standard requires that a trailing slash causes the link to be
followed. This is the behavior of historical implementations. For
example, for /a/b and /a/b/, if /a/b is a symbolic link to a
directory, then /a/b refers to the symbolic link, and /a/b/ refers to
the directory to which the symbolic link points.

Also see GNU Coreutils: Trailing slashes.