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Is there an easy way to show whether there are any symlinks in a specified path pointing to a certain directory or one of its children?
512
Use the ls -l command to check whether a given file is a symbolic link, and to find the file or directory that symbolic link point to. The first character “l”, indicates that the file is a symlink. The “->” symbol shows the file the symlink points to.
The first way is by using the ls command in UNIX which displays files, directories, and links in any directory and the other way is by using UNIX find command which has the ability to search any kind of file e.g. file, directory, or link.
Symlink, also known as a symbolic link in Linux, creates a link to a file or a directory for easier access. To put it in another way, symlinks are links that points to another file or folder in your system, quite similar to the shortcuts in Windows.
A simple and fast approach, assuming that you have the target as absolute path (readlink(1) may help with that matter):
find $PATH -type l -xtype d -lname "$DIR*"
This finds all symlinks (-type l) below $PATH which link to a directory (-xtype d) with a name starting with $DIR.
Another approach, which is O(n*m) and therefore may take ages and two days:
find $DIR -type d | xargs -n1 find $PATH -lname
The first find lists $DIR and all its subdirectories which are then passed (xargs), one at a time (-n1), to a second find which looks for all symlinks originating below $PATH.
To sum things up: find(1) is your friend.
175
Following up on the answer given by earl:
-xtype does not work on Mac OSX, but can be safely omitted:
find $PATH -type l -lname "$DIR*"
Example:
find ~/ -type l -lname "~/my/sub/folder/*"
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