[PLUG] Tracing back symlinks

[Paul Heinlein]

On Wed, 29 May 2002, Sean Lewis wrote:

> On Wed, 2002-05-29 at 12:25, Ed Sawicki wrote:
> > Given a normal file that has symbolic links pointing to it, is
> > there a way to list all the links (the aliases pointing to the
> > normal file)?
> 
> The only thing I can think of would be to use find, searching for
> the text string of the file location in file contents.

You can do something like

   find / -type l -printf '%p -> %l\n'

to get a listing of symlinks and the files to which they point. 
Besides what Wil mentioned about links possibly residing on systems 
that mount the file in question via nfs, there's also the problem of 
relative links (e.g., foo -> ../../../foo). So if foo isn't uniquely 
named, you'll have to manually look through the find results to catch 
all potential links.

--Paul Heinlein <heinlein at attbi.com>