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.

  • mina86@lemmy.wtf
    0·
    28 days ago

    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 {} +