This section documents the behavior of GNU Fortran for file operations on symbolic links, on systems that support them.
INQUIRE
statements of the “inquire by file” form
relate to the target of the symbolic link. For example,
INQUIRE(FILE="foo",EXIST=ex)
sets ex to .true. if
foo is a symbolic link pointing to an existing file, and .false.
if foo points to an non-existing file (“dangling” symbolic link).
OPEN
statement with a STATUS="NEW"
specifier
on a symbolic link results in an error condition, whether the symbolic
link points to an existing target or is dangling.
CLOSE
statement
with a STATUS="DELETE"
specifier causes the symbolic link itself
to be deleted, not its target.