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

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?

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

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.

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]$ 

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...

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/

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 {} \;