S3: would be nice to ignore symbolic links

[ddarbyson]

Please add --[no]-follow_symlinks or similar to ignore symbolic links when using S3 cp, sync, etc.. commands.

Otherwise --exclude */my/path/aliases/* --exclude */my/path/sites/* can be cumbersome.

[shaneiseminger]

+1 on on this. If you have several symlinks it is pretty cumbersome to manually --exclude them all, and it makes backup script maintenance more complicated. In my case, I'm trying to run a backup to S3, and aws is creating a duplicate copy of a very large symlinked directory.

[forrie]

There should be a command-line switch to ignore symlinks (or follow them), as most other utilities have. This is standard. I just had a large copy choke and die because aws-cli didn't know how to handle a symlink that pointed to nothing.

[campbellwmorgan]

+1 on this finding it very annoying to manually exclude symlinks

[woodnt]

+1 agree

[seangps]

+10

[tnoskilz]

seriously, please! I was going to try to migrate to using aws s3 sync and role-based auth instead of s3cmd for instance provisioning from s3 buckets in my cloudformation templates. Instead, it barfs on every broken symlink on the instance. Excluding them from the sync doesn't help. I even tried breaking my / level sync down into individual subdirs and hit other broken symlinks on a fresh amazon linux instance. This is maddening when these symlinks aren't related to any of the files being sync'd to the instance from s3. (or even in directories it should be diving into).

[jamesls]

Thanks for the feedback. Marking this as accepted, we'll add a --[no]-follow-symlinks option to the s3 commands.

[jamesls]

Closing, this was implemented via #854 and now part of the latest CLI release. Thanks everyone for the feedback.