I'll resume mumbling to myself... I definitely should have read the documentation for the pertaining libc functions earlier. The patch below makes (file-regular-p "/symlink") return nil on glibc2 systems, however I don't know about compatibility with other libc's. Can anybody tell? *** src/fileio.c 1999/02/03 23:24:46 1.1 --- src/fileio.c 1999/02/04 00:01:22 *************** *** 2495,2501 **** if (!NILP (handler)) return call2 (handler, Qfile_regular_p, abspath); ! if (stat ((char *) XSTRING_DATA (abspath), &st) < 0) return Qnil; return (st.st_mode & S_IFMT) == S_IFREG ? Qt : Qnil; } --- 2495,2501 ---- if (!NILP (handler)) return call2 (handler, Qfile_regular_p, abspath); ! if (lstat ((char *) XSTRING_DATA (abspath), &st) < 0) return Qnil; return (st.st_mode & S_IFMT) == S_IFREG ? Qt : Qnil; }