How to find files excluding symbolic links?

Question

I want to find files in Linux that follow a certain pattern but I am not interested in symbolic links.

There doesn't seem to be an option to the find command for that.

How shall I do ?

Instinctive

Stack Overflow is a site for programming and development questions. This question appears to be off-topic because it is not about programming or development. See What topics can I ask about here in the Help Center. Perhaps Super User or Unix & Linux Stack Exchange would be a better place to ask. – Heroic

The comment above is misleading. A lot of devs use the find command inside of bash and shell scripts -- Of which are, in fact, both programming and development. Also someone found the question useful -- As proven by the 94 (95 after mine) upvotes. – Disjoined

Answer 1

Check the man page again ;) It's:

find /path/to/files -type f

type f searches for regular files only - excluding symbolic links.

Descendant

ha ha, yes ok, I thought that regular file included symbolic links. Sorry about that. Well you will get some points for an easy question :) – Instinctive

here it matched symlinks pointing to regular files, I had to use -type f -xtype f – Condensed

@AquariusPower I cannot reproduce that. Which version of find are you using? – Descendant

find (GNU findutils) 4.4.2, here test case: echo >>asdf.txt;ln -s asdf.txt asdf.txt.lnk;find -type f;echo;find -type f -xtype f – Condensed

I get two times ./asdf which seems to prove that -type f delivers the same results.. – Descendant

This doesn't always work I have symblic links that are broken which show up in the find. I have another loop that checks for them with fhe file command as a work around – Haematic

Is this expected: when searching by name using a regex likely to find both files and symlinks, if you specify -type f after the -name, then find will still return both regular files and symlinks; but if you specify -type f before the -name, then find returns files only? E.g. find /path/to -name "*.so*" -type f returns files and symlinks, and find /path/to -type f -name "*.so*" returns files only. – Corollaceous

@Corollaceous Wasn't able to reproduce this. I suggest to open a question if the problem still exists. – Descendant

Answer 2

! -type l

For example, if you want to search all regular files in /usr/bin, excluding symlink:

find /usr/bin/ \! -type l

Maggee

No -type l will search ONLY FOR symbolic links. Checkout man page – Morganica

Negating test with "!" (pling) - which should be escaped if necessary - will return anything that ISN'T a symlink. – Unstressed

This should be the correct answer because it worked for me opposed to -type f which allowed in broken symlinks fyi – Haematic

While searching in a directory hierarchy it may be useful to exclude directories too with ! -type d – Chak

Answer 3

Do you want it to follow symlinks but not return them (if they match your pattern)?

find -H?

man find
     ...
     -H      Cause the file information and file type (see stat(2)) returned for each symbolic link specified on the command line to be those of
             the file referenced by the link, not the link itself.  If the referenced file does not exist, the file information and type will be
             for the link itself.  File information of all symbolic links not on the command line is that of the link itself.

     -L      Cause the file information and file type (see stat(2)) returned for each symbolic link to be those of the file referenced by the
             link, not the link itself.  If the referenced file does not exist, the file information and type will be for the link itself.

             This option is equivalent to the deprecated -follow primary.

Room

Answer 4

I have readed the MAN and now it seems is -P also, using -type r would raise an error. also notice is the DEFAULT behavior now.

-P Never follow symbolic links. This is the default behaviour. When find examines or prints information a file, and the file is a symbolic link, the information used shall be taken from the properties of the symbolic link itself.

Assured

Yes but the OP does not want any results coming from symlink - I presume to avoid duplicate processing, since the 'find' will probably return both the "real" file and that addressed by the symlink to the same "real" file. – Unstressed

Answer 5

Like @AquariusPower say, the use of find -type f -xtype f solved my problem, and now I get only real files and not symbolic links anymore.

From: https://linux.die.net/man/1/find

I got:

-xtype c
The same as -type unless the file is a symbolic link. For symbolic links: if the -H or -P option was specified, true if the file is a link to a file of type c; if the -L option has been given, true if c is 'l'. In other words, for symbolic links, -xtype checks the type of the file that -type does not check.

Emrick

Answer 6

This works for me:

find -H . -maxdepth 1 -type f

Actually, don't really need the -H

Hammerless

-type f didn't work for me, I still was getting broken symlinks ! -type l mentioned above worked for me – Haematic