How do I move a relative symbolic link?

Question

I have a lot of relative symbolic links that I want to move to another directory.

How can I move symbolic links (those with a relative path) while preserving the right path?

Answer 1

You can turn relative paths into full paths using readlink -f foo. So you would do something like:

ln -s $(readlink -f $origlink) $newlink rm $origlink 

EDIT:

I noticed that you wish to keep the paths relative. In this case, after you move the link, you can use symlinks -c to convert the absolute paths back into relative paths.

Answer 2

This is a perl solution that preserves relative paths:

use strictures; use File::Copy qw(mv); use Getopt::Long qw(GetOptions); use Path::Class qw(file); use autodie qw(:all GetOptions mv);  my $target; GetOptions('target-directory=s' => \$target); die "$0 -t target_dir symlink1 symlink2 symlink3\n" unless $target && -d $target;  for (@ARGV) {     unless (-l $_) {         warn "$_ is not a symlink\n";         next;     }     my $newlink = file(readlink $_)->relative($target)->stringify;     unlink $_;     symlink $newlink, $_;     mv $_, $target; }