Searching for sym-links to a filesystem

[Chern Jian Leaw]

HI,

I have a filesystem i.e /fs10/patterns/design.
Is there a way to search for the name of the symbolic link which is pointing TO /fs10/patterns/design?

Could someone please show me how it's done?

Thanks.

[Michael Tully]

Not sure what your filesystem name is that your trying to find... but here is how to find all symbolic links within a filesystem.

# cd /fs10/patterns/design
# find . -xdev -type l -print | xargs ll

If there are too many you could output his to a file.

# find . -xdev -type l -print | xargs ll >/tmp/wrk

[Bill Hassell]

A symlink is a 1-way link. It is created (somewhere) and points to your file or directory. There is no connection going the other way. So you'll have to use find, look just for symlinks, then use the ll to shown where the link is pointing and grep for the directory you are looking for:

find / -type s -exec ll {} \; | grep /fs10/patterns/design

[Chern Jian Leaw]

Bill,
Your suggestion of:
find / -type l -exec || {}\;|grep /fs10/patterns/design
produced the following error:
An expression term lacks a required parameter.

I tried also on using:
find /fs36 -type l -exec grep /fs10/patterns/design {}\;
which takes a long time to produce the results.

Could you tell me how it should have been done?

Thanks.

[Chern Jian Leaw]

Michael,

I'm trying to find search for the sym-link name which is pointing to the original data i.e: /fs10/patterns/design.

The method which you showed seemed to only work for searching for links within /fs10/patterns/design.

I would like to search for links TO /fs10/patterns/design.

Could you help me out?

Thanks.

[Michael Tully · Accepted solution]

Try it this way, using 'xargs' instead of '-exec' should be more efficient.

find /fs36 -type l | xargs grep /fs10/patterns/design

[Frank Slootweg]

> Bill,
> Your suggestion of:
> find / -type l -exec || {}\;|grep /fs10/patterns/design
> produced the following error:
> An expression term lacks a required parameter.

Please look very closely at Bill's example. I.e. your posting contained several errors, not only pipe-symbols instead of ells ("l", lower-case L), but also missing spaces. The find syntax, especially for "-exec ..." is *very* precise, i.e. spaces *do* matter.

But yes, the parameter for the "-type" option should be "l" (ell, lower-case "L"), not "s". :-)