because zsh I swapped out ~ -> $HOME. In addition to some permission denied that you always get finding over the home dir, I get these weird hits:

find "$HOME" -type l -exec /bin/sh /path/to/the/script "/path/to/target/dir" {} +
/home/user/.konan/dependencies/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu-gcc-8.3.0-glibc-2.19-kernel-4.9-2/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/lib64/libatomic.so
/home/user/.mozilla/firefox/xxx000xx.someprofile/chrome/dir/file.css

lib atomic is something I’ve heard of vaguely but certainly not anything I use. I couldn’t identify any way this file was doing anything outside the ~/.konan dir.

the CSS files there were a few different ones in a couple different Firefox profiles. it’s the user customization. But I don’t think it should have anything to do with the directory I was asking for.

If I give it a bit more of a hint, telling to look in ~/.config specifically, now I get some (but not all) the links I expect.

find "$HOME/.config" -type l -exec /bin/sh /path/to/the/script "/path/to/target/dir" {} +
/home/user/.config/dir02
/home/user/.config/dir01/subdir/file
/home/user/.config/dir01/subdir2/file2

And suggesting it searches in the .konan dir where it found lib atomimc, it now doesn’t find anything.

find "$HOME/.konan" -type l -exec /bin/sh /path/to/the/script "/path/to/target/dir" {} +

Could be all kinds of things getting the way. Different versions of relevant tools, filesystems/setups, permissions…