The following options modify how chown and chgrp traverse a hierarchy when the --recursive (-R) option is also specified. If more than one of the following options is specified, only the final one takes effect. These options specify whether processing a symbolic link to a directory entails operating on just the symbolic link or on all files in the hierarchy rooted at that directory.
These options are independent of --dereference and --no-dereference (-h), which control whether to modify a symlink or its referent.