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  • Please edit your question to show us a minimal working example that demonstrates the problem. (It should be possible to run from an empty directory and illustrate what you are finding confusing.) Also, what research have you done in order to answer this yourself? At least on my system, the man page for find describes -P, -L and -H very nearly at the top. Your question is receiving downvotes because it doesn't contain the information necessary to provide a good answer nor any evidence of effort in trying to find the answer yourself before asking others. Commented Sep 1, 2016 at 11:12
  • I believe that this question should never have been closed, and (at the risk of ruffling some feathers) that the people who voted to close it might not have fully grokked it. (1) @aCVn says “Please edit your question to show us a minimal working example that demonstrates the problem.” The next clause, “It should be possible to run from an empty directory …”, is the height of either irony or sarcastic snarkiness. The question literally, explicitly asks «What is the difference between “find -H” and “find -L” …?» … (Cont’d) Commented May 29, 2019 at 19:53
  • (Cont’d) … In other words, «I do “find -H” and “find -L” and I get identical results. When do they ever do anything different?» Trivially, “find -H” and “find -L” will produce identical results in an empty directory, as will (for example) ls, ls -A, ls -b, ls -c, ls -C, ls -F, ls -G, ls -i, ls -m, ls -q, ls -r, ls -t and about a dozen others — including (spoiler alert) ls -H and ls -L. The trick — the challenge — what the question asks — is how to create a minimal working example that demonstrates that the options do, in fact, do different things. … (Cont’d) Commented May 29, 2019 at 19:53
  • (Cont’d) …  (2) aCVn doesn’t exactly say “RTFM”, but they come close.  Well, imagine that you’re just learning Unix / Linux.  You have a basic knowledge of some basic commands (e.g., cat / more / less, an editor, cp, ln, mv, rm, mkdir, rmdir, maybe chmod, etc.) and somebody tells you that ls is the command to list files and directories, and that almost every letter in the alphabet is a valid option to ls — but they don’t tell you any details, and you don’t have access to any relevant documentation. … (Cont’d) Commented May 29, 2019 at 19:53
  • (Cont’d) …  So you try to discover what they all mean by experimenting. If you create file1, and then file2, and then file3, you’re going to have a hard time discovering that -r and -t do different things. If you don’t know what . and .. are, you’re in for a surprise. If you don’t know the lore of “dot-files”, it’s going to take you while to figure out -A. … … … … How long is it going to take you to figure out -H and -L? How long is it going to take you to think of creating symbolic links and seeing how ls treats them when you specify different options? … (Cont’d) Commented May 29, 2019 at 19:54