Symlink – How to Find All Symbolic Links in a Directory

symlink

On this question or on this one (for example) you will get solutions on how to look for symlinks pointing to a given directory (let's call it /dir1), while I am interested to symbolic links possibly pointing to any file/folder inside /dir1.

I want to delete such directory but I am not sure that I am safe to do so, as on an other directory (let's call it /dir2), I may have symlinks pointing to inner parts of /dir1.

Further, I may have created these symlinks using absolute or relative paths.
My only help is that I know the symlinks I want to check are on a mounted filesystem, on /dir2.

Best Answer

You can find all the symbolic links using:

find / -type l

you might want to run this as root in order to get to every place on the disc.

You can expand these using readlink -f to get the full path of the link and you should be able to grep the output against the target directory that you are considering for deletion:

find / -type l -exec readlink -f {} + | grep -F /dir2

Using find / -type l -printf '%l\n' doesn't work as you get relative links like ../tmp/xyz which might be pointing to your target dir, but are not matched because they are not fully expanded.

Related Solutions

Copy symlink AND where it points to using rsync

If you know the symlink name and want to transfer the link and the target you can:

rsync -a 'symlink' .
realdir="$(basename "$(readlink -f 'symlink')")"
rsync -a "$realdir" .

The first rsync transfers just the symlink. The second command finds the real directory name, and the second rsync transfers the directory content.

Find all symbolic links in a directory tree pointing outside that tree

You want a program called realpath, used in conjunction with find.

E.g.:

find . -type l -exec realpath {} \; | grep -v "^$(pwd)"

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Copy symlink AND where it points to using rsync

Find all symbolic links in a directory tree pointing outside that tree

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