Menu
ls command to find a symbolic link in UNIX systems when you run the ls -lrt command in any directory it prints permission details of each file and directories, if you look carefully for links that String starts with a small L ( l for the link).
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.
In Command Prompt, run this command: dir /AL /S c:\ A list of all of the symbolic links in the c:\ directory will be returned.
By default, find examines symbolic links themselves when it finds them (and, if it later comes across the linked-to file, it will examine that, too). If you would prefer find to dereference the links and examine the file that each link points to, specify the ' -L ' option to find .
It depends, if you are trying to find links to a specific file that is called foo.txt, then this is the only good way:
find -L / -samefile path/to/foo.txt
On the other hand, if you are just trying to find links to any file that happens to be named foo.txt, then something like
find / -lname foo.txt
or
find . -lname \*foo.txt # ignore leading pathname components
Find the inode number of the file and then search for all files with the same inode number:
$ ls -i foo.txt
41525360 foo.txt
$ find . -follow -inum 41525360
Alternatively, try the lname option of find, but this won't work if you have relative symlinks e.g. a -> ../foo.txt
$ find . -lname /path/to/foo.txt
I prefer to use the symlinks utility, which also is handy when searching for broken symlinks. Install by:
sudo apt install symlinks
Show all symlinks in current folder and subfolders:
symlinks -rv .
-r: recursive-v: verbose (show all symlinks, not only broken ones)To find a specific symlink, just grep:
symlinks -rv . | grep foo.txt
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With