Find symlinks to certain directory or one of its subdirs

Question

Is there an easy way to show whether there are any symlinks in a specified path pointing to a certain directory or one of its children?

Maiden

Answer 1

A simple and fast approach, assuming that you have the target as absolute path (readlink(1) may help with that matter):

find $PATH -type l -xtype d -lname "$DIR*"

This finds all symlinks (-type l) below $PATH which link to a directory (-xtype d) with a name starting with $DIR.

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Another approach, which is O(n*m) and therefore may take ages and two days:

find $DIR -type d | xargs -n1 find $PATH -lname

The first find lists $DIR and all its subdirectories which are then passed (xargs), one at a time (-n1), to a second find which looks for all symlinks originating below $PATH.

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To sum things up: find(1) is your friend.

Beason

find $PATH -type l -lname "$DIR*" – Xylene

find $PATH -type l -lname "$DIR*" -exec ls -l {} \; – Xylene

Answer 2

Following up on the answer given by earl:

-xtype does not work on Mac OSX, but can be safely omitted:

find $PATH -type l -lname "$DIR*"

Example:

find ~/ -type l -lname "~/my/sub/folder/*"

Corvine

-xtype is used to find symbolic links when -L (old days -follow) is on. -xtype is afaik is a GNU extension. And you are correct. It can be safely omitted since -L is not used. One think though -type d will give directories only and -type l -type d will give symbolic links to directories only. – Angkor

Answer 3

Have a look at the findbl (bad links) script in fslint. It might give you some hints: http://code.google.com/p/fslint/source/browse/trunk/fslint/findbl

Ade