7d ago

look for symlinks pointing at the contents of directory?

I want to move a directory with a bunch of subdirectories and files. But I have the feeling there might be some symlinks to a few of them elsewhere on the file system. (As in the directory contains the targets of symlinks.)

How do I search all files for symlinks pointing to them?

Some combination of find, stat, ls, realpath, readlink and maybe xargs? I can't quite figure it out.

7 comments

find / -lname '/path/you/are/looking/for/*'
Note that the -lname option is a GNU find extension and may not work with other find implementations.

I think it's easier the other way round, find all symlinks and grep the directory you want to move from results.
Something like 'find /home/user -type -l -exec ls -l {} | grep yourdirectory' and work from there. I don't think there's an easy way to list which symlinks point to any actual file.
- ~~You want readlink -f rather than ls -l.~~ ++OK, actually not exactly. readlink won’t print path to the symlink so it’s not as straightforward.++
  Also, you want + in find ... -exec ... + rather than ;.
  At this point I feel committed to making readlink work. ;) Here’s the script you want:
  
  #!/bin/sh want=$1 shift readlink -f -- "$@" | while read got; do if [ "$got" = "$want" ]; then echo "$1" fi shift done
  and execute it as:
  
  find ~ -type l -exec /bin/sh /path/to/the/script /path/to/target/dir {} +
  
  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:
  sh
  
  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.
  sh
  
  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.
  sh
  
  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...

If you just rename the dir, and then find all broken symlinks in your system?
find . -xtype l

You could just move the dir and leave a symlink in its place. It doesn't solve the actual problem, but it's much easier and will keep everything working just fine.

7 comments