look for symlinks pointing at the contents of directory?
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.
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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++OK, actually not exactly.readlink -frather thanls -l.readlinkwon’t print path to the symlink so it’s not as straightforward.++Also, you want
+infind ... -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 "$1" fi shift doneand execute it as:
find ~ -type l -exec /bin/sh /path/to/the/script /path/to/target/dir {} +because
zshI swapped out~->$HOME. In addition to some permission denied that you always getfinding over the home dir, I get these weird hits:find "$HOME" -type l -exec /bin/sh /path/to/the/script "/path/to/target/dir" {} + /home/user/.konan/dependencies/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu-gcc-8.3.0-glibc-2.19-kernel-4.9-2/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/lib64/libatomic.so /home/user/.mozilla/firefox/xxx000xx.someprofile/chrome/dir/file.csslib atomic is something I've heard of vaguely but certainly not anything I use. I couldn't identify any way this file was doing anything outside the
~/.konandir.the CSS files there were a few different ones in a couple different Firefox profiles. it's the user customization. But I don't think it should have anything to do with the directory I was asking for.
If I give it a bit more of a hint, telling to look in
~/.configspecifically, now I get some (but not all) the links I expect.find "$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/file2And suggesting it searches in the
.konandir where it found lib atomimc, it now doesn't find anything.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...
You could pass
$1and$gotthrough$(realpath -P -- ...)to make sure all the path are in canonical form. Though now that I’m thinking about it,statis probably a better option anyway:want=/path/to/target/dir pattern=$(stat -c^%d:%i: -- "$want") find "$HOME" -type l -exec stat -Lc%d:%i:%n {} + | grep "$pattern"