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    hellip  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

User · Answer

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 - gt   dir3 symlinkTarget lrwxrwxrwx 1 apache develop 81 Jan 10 14 02   dir1 dir2 dir4 symlink2 - gt   dir5 whatever symlink2Target etc

User · Answer

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 gt   dev null

User · Answer

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  amp  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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

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

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