[MacPerl] Not resolving volume aliases.

[Dan Avery <dan.avery@hq.nasa.gov>]

Greetings!  As a longtime faithful MacPerl user (thanks Matthias!) but a
new subscriber to this list, I hope this question hasn't been answered too
recently.

I have a script that recursively scans the startup volume for backing up
certain types of data.
It works fine, except whenever it hits an alias to a network volume(like in
the "Recent Servers" folder), at which point my Mac pops up the standard
AppleShare login box.  If I hit "Cancel" on the dialog, everything
continues and works fine, but since this script will be run on literally
hundreds of machines here, I'd like to make it as supervision-free as
possible.   I've tried doing the -l test and stat() on each item, but it
seems that the script wants to do the check on the resolved alias and not
the alias file itself, because each time I try one of those, the dialog
pops up again.  Is there something I'm missing that might be a way to
stat() or test the status with -l of an alias to a directory without
resolving it?

Thanks in advance for any help!
Dan Avery
Boeing Information Services/NASA HQ
dan.avery@hq.nasa.gov