Java 7 : Does knowing a file is symbolic link or not helps?

In Java 7 it provides me a way to detect whether a file is symbolic link or not , but why anyone would want to know that .

Files.isSymbolicLink(target) //here target is a path.

I never needed that so far, just wondering what will be the use of it ?

Suppose you're writing a recursive directory copy - you may decide not to follow symbolic links. Or maybe you're creating an archive in a format that doesn't support symbolic links - you may want to warn the user if you encounter one. Or maybe you're writing a diff program, and you want to skip pairs of files which are actually the same file really.

Basically it's a reasonably common property of some files in a file system - why would Java not want to expose that information?

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