LS Command – How to Use Long Format (-l) While Following Directory Symlinks

What you are looking for might be qfile. It is part of app-portage/portage-utils package and provides option -o or --orphans. You can use something like

find /usr/bin | xargs -I{} qfile -o {}

to get a list of orphaned files in /usr/bin.

Remark: Sadly, qfile in the current stable version of portage-utils, does not support readin from stdin, and the solution mentioned in the man page of qfile qfile -o $(find /usr/bin) does not work if the find result set is large, therefore we have to work around it a little bit, using xargs.

BTW, this is not something I myself came up with, but I found it at gossamer-threads, a comment by yvasilev.

bash "knows" about symlinks and tracks this info when you use a symlink to enter a directory.

You can check this by doing the following in your example:

$ cd /dir2
$ cd linked
$ pwd
/dir2/linked
$ PWD='' bash -c pwd
/dir1

You need to start the bash with an empty PWD variable, otherwise it uses that trick to display the "fake" path.

Note that ls is a separate program and as such doesn't have bash's knowledge of how you arrived at the current directory, so ls .. will just show the contents of the real parent directory, not relative to the symlink you followed.

Most programs will not depend on the environment variable CWD as there are many ways of starting programs, via the bash shell is just one so it's not reliable to expect CWD to contain the correct value (try setting CWD to something wrong before doing bash -c pwd, you can see it checks the value for sanity).