Ruby

I can confirm that test -f and File.file? seem to have the same return values in this example:

ln -s link file ruby -e 'puts File.file?("link")' false test -f link; echo $? 1 touch file ruby -e 'puts File.file?("link")' true test -f link; echo $? 0 

Though, I'm using ruby 2.1.2 on mac os 10.9.4, so your mileage may vary :)

ruby --version ruby 2.1.2p95 (2014-05-08 revision 45877) [x86_64-darwin13.0] 

Citing from POSIX manpage test(1)

With the exception of the -h pathname and -L pathname primaries,
if a pathname argument is a symbolic link, test shall evaluate the
expression by resolving the symbolic link and using the file
referenced by the link.

Nobuyoshi Nakada wrote:

Citing from POSIX manpage test(1)

With the exception of the -h pathname and -L pathname primaries,
if a pathname argument is a symbolic link, test shall evaluate the
expression by resolving the symbolic link and using the file
referenced by the link.

Oh my, just double-checked, Python and Perl have implemented the same behaviour as test(1), along with Ruby.

The big difference being the wording of the documentation. The test man page explicitly states:

True if pathname resolves to an existing directory entry for a [..]

as well as the paragraph you quoted.

I guess clarifying that in the File documentation is warranted as well as pointing out that people are strongly advised to use lstat if they want consistent behaviour.

I personally would go as far and ditch the test(1) semantics and stick to querying lstat() by default, but that's just me and will probably break lots of things ;)