How do I find all of the symlinks in a directory tree?

Question

I'm trying to find all of the symlinks within a directory tree for my website. I know that I can use find to do this but I can't figure out how to recursively check the directories.

I've tried this command:

find /var/www/ -type l

… and later I discovered that the contents in /var/www are symlinks, so I've changed the command to:

find -L /var/www/ -type l

it take a while to run, however I'm getting no matches.

How do I get this to check subdirectories?

Homologue

Answer 1

This will recursively traverse the /path/to/folder directory and list only the symbolic links:

ls -lR /path/to/folder | grep '^l'

If your intention is to follow the symbolic links too, you should use your find command but you should include the -L option; in fact the find man page says:

   -L     Follow symbolic links.  When find examines or prints information
          about files, the information used shall be taken from the  prop‐
          erties  of  the file to which the link points, not from the link
          itself (unless it is a broken symbolic link or find is unable to
          examine  the file to which the link points).  Use of this option
          implies -noleaf.  If you later use the -P option,  -noleaf  will
          still  be  in  effect.   If -L is in effect and find discovers a
          symbolic link to a subdirectory during its search, the subdirec‐
          tory pointed to by the symbolic link will be searched.

          When the -L option is in effect, the -type predicate will always
          match against the type of the file that a symbolic  link  points
          to rather than the link itself (unless the symbolic link is bro‐
          ken).  Using -L causes the -lname and -ilname predicates  always
          to return false.

Then try this:

find -L /var/www/ -type l

This will probably work: I found in the find man page this diamond: if you are using the -type option you have to change it to the -xtype option:

          l      symbolic link; this is never true if the -L option or the
                 -follow option is in effect, unless the symbolic link  is
                 broken.  If you want to search for symbolic links when -L
                 is in effect, use -xtype.

Then:

find -L /var/www/ -xtype l

Treillage

The way I interpret the -L option is that this just wont work since it matches against the type of the file that the link points to. Thanks for highlight this from the man page, I did miss it! – Homologue

Make that ls -laR /path/to/folder | grep ^l if you also want to process "hidden" dot folders ... – Leninakan

Thank you! But this only shows the name of links but not their location. – Johnston

in Mac OSX (10.9), -xtype is not available. find . -type l seems to be checking recursively. – Saturniid

Works like a charm with find (GNU findutils) 4.4.2 Just as a side note, the xtype -l is 'dash el' not 'dash one' the code formatting on SE makes it look like either. – Pier

In case you want to find file-only symbolic links (ignoring completely directory links) do: find -l /path/tosearch/ -xtype f or for symlinks to all kinds of non-directory nodes: find -l /path/tosearch/ -not -xtype d – Waac

in Mac OSX (10.15.x/Catalina), the -xtype still not supported . The -ls can show detail (including target file of a symlink). For a non-sym-link dir which has 2 symlinks & 2 real files, The find -L /var/www/ -type l -print0 -ls shows nothing, The find -L /var/www/ -print0 -ls shows all 4 (2 symlinks & 2 files) & the /bar/www/ dir itself, The find /var/www/ -type l -print0 -ls shows 2 symlinks, The find /var/www/ -type f -print0 -ls shows 2 real files, The find /var/www/ -print0 -ls shows 4 files (2 symlinks & 2 real files) & the /bar/www/ dir itself, & -not -type d skips dir(s) – Embargo

For one command to list them all with targets: find -L . -type l -exec ls -l {} \; – Accessary

Answer 2

One command, no pipes

find . -type l -ls

Explanation: find from the current directory . onwards all references of -type link and list -ls those in detail. Plain and simple...

Expanding upon this answer, here are a couple more symbolic link related find commands:

Find symbolic links to a specific target

find . -lname link_target

Note that link_target is a pattern that may contain wildcard characters.

Find broken symbolic links

find -L . -type l -ls

The -L option instructs find to follow symbolic links, unless when broken.

Find & replace broken symbolic links

find -L . -type l -delete -exec ln -s new_target {} \;

More find examples

More find examples can be found here: https://hamwaves.com/find/

Chiliarch

If you're looking to be more succinct it might be worth mentioning that most versions of find have an -ls option. So find . -type l -ls should be the equivalent of the above. – Scrape

This improves on the accepted answer because it also tells you where the symlinks are in the directory tree, especially important when working with the kind of complex and deep tree as is likely to have symlinks. – Stoup

Unless run as root, the command would miss any symlinks it can't get to (which may be what you want). To be thorough, use sudo sh -c 'find / -type l -ls > /symlink.list': this will list all of the symlinks of the entire file system in the root-owned file /symlink.list. – Fiend

This answer is far more useful than the accepted one. Also, if you want to find symlinks that point to files in some directory: find -lname '*/dir/*' -printf '%P -> %l\n'. It worth mentioning that link_target is a pattern. – Schoonmaker

At least on my system there is a lot of spacing of the output so | tr -s ' ' helps. – Hartmann

Answer 3

find already looks recursively by default:

[15:21:53 ~]$ mkdir foo
[15:22:28 ~]$ cd foo
[15:22:31 ~/foo]$ mkdir bar
[15:22:35 ~/foo]$ cd bar
[15:22:36 ~/foo/bar]$ ln -s ../foo abc
[15:22:40 ~/foo/bar]$ cd ..
[15:22:47 ~/foo]$ ln -s foo abc
[15:22:52 ~/foo]$ find ./ -type l
.//abc
.//bar/abc
[15:22:57 ~/foo]$ 

British

This is probably one of those gotcha's, all of the files in /var/www are symlinks. Does find recurse those by default? I'm guessing not ;) – Homologue

Ya, probably to avoid looping. – British

I've updated to use the -L flag for find without any luck - any guesses? – Homologue

Perfect solution, and it shows the location of links. Thank you! – Johnston

Answer 4

To see just the symlinks themselves, you can use

find -L /path/to/dir/ -xtype l 

while if you want to see also which files they target, just append an ls

find -L /path/to/dir/ -xtype l -exec ls -al {} \;

Eversion

Answer 5

This is the best thing I've found so far - shows you the symlinks in the current directory, recursively, but without following them, displayed with full paths and other information:

find ./ -type l -print0 | xargs -0 ls -plah

outputs looks about like this:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 apache develop 99 Dec  5 12:49 ./dir/dir2/symlink1 -> /dir3/symlinkTarget
lrwxrwxrwx 1 apache develop 81 Jan 10 14:02 ./dir1/dir2/dir4/symlink2 -> /dir5/whatever/symlink2Target
etc...

Favata

fd equiv fd . -t l --print0 | xargs -0 ls -plah – Amundson

Answer 6

Kindly find below one liner bash script command to find all broken symbolic links recursively in any linux based OS

a=$(find / -type l); for i in $(echo $a); do file $i ; done |grep -i broken 2> /dev/null

Putter

Your command can be find / -type l -exec file {} \; | grep -i broken 2>/dev/null. Please bear in mind that you will probably have a lot of false positives. – Sharpe

Answer 7

You can install "symlinks" package and use the utility

symlinks -rv "/path"

    -c == change absolute/messy links to relative
    -d == delete dangling links
    -o == warn about links across file systems
    -r == recurse into subdirs
    -s == shorten lengthy links (displayed in output only when -c not specified)
    -t == show what would be done by -c
    -v == verbose (show all symlinks)

Dangling links are broken ones.

Acrylonitrile

Answer 8

What I do is create a script in my bin directory that is like an alias. For example I have a script named lsd ls -l | grep ^d

you could make one lsl ls -lR | grep ^l

Just chmod them +x and you are good to go.

Zuber