How to find all symlinks to a file?

Question

This is my hierarchy:

aaaaaaaa
|_q
  |_a.txt
|_w
  |_l1
  |_l2

l1 and l2 are symlinks to a.txt. I run this code to find all symlinks to a.txt in the /aaaaaaaa:

find ~/aaaaaaaa/ -exec ls -a {} ';' | grep '/home/khodor/aaaaaaaa/q/a.txt'

And it obviously doesn't work, cause I must compare realpath of file with path of a.txt. In what way I should do this?

Answer 1

If you have GNU/BSD find just use -samefile primary.

$ find -L ~/aaaaaaaa/ -samefile ~/aaaaaaaa/q/a.txt 
/home/oguz/aaaaaaaa/q/a.txt
/home/oguz/aaaaaaaa/w/l2
/home/oguz/aaaaaaaa/w/l1

Answer 2

referenceid=$(stat -Lc '%d-%i' /home/khodor/aaaaaaaa/q/a.txt)
find ~/aaaaaaaa/ -type l -print0 | while IFS= read -r -d '' filename
do
  if [ "$(stat -Lc '%d-%i' "$filename")" = "$referenceid" ]
  then
    printf -- '%s\n' "$filename"
  fi
done

This initially gets a unique ID for a base file, e.g. /home/khodor/aaaaaaaa/q/a.txt. The ID is computed from the device ID and the inode, using stat.

Then it parses your folder using file, limited to symbolic links (thanks to -type l), and for each filename it gets the device ID and inode using stat again, using its -L option that dereferences the link before fetching the ID.

For each device ID and inode that matches the reference ID, it prints the filename.