Find all symbolic links linux

How do I find all of the symlinks in a directory tree?

I’m trying to find all of the symlinks within a directory tree for my website. I know that I can use find to do this but I can’t figure out how to recursively check the directories. I’ve tried this command:

it take a while to run, however I’m getting no matches. How do I get this to check subdirectories?

8 Answers 8

This will recursively traverse the /path/to/folder directory and list only the symbolic links:

ls -lR /path/to/folder | grep '^l' 

If your intention is to follow the symbolic links too, you should use your find command but you should include the -L option; in fact the find man page says:

 -L Follow symbolic links. When find examines or prints information about files, the information used shall be taken from the prop‐ erties of the file to which the link points, not from the link itself (unless it is a broken symbolic link or find is unable to examine the file to which the link points). Use of this option implies -noleaf. If you later use the -P option, -noleaf will still be in effect. If -L is in effect and find discovers a symbolic link to a subdirectory during its search, the subdirec‐ tory pointed to by the symbolic link will be searched. When the -L option is in effect, the -type predicate will always match against the type of the file that a symbolic link points to rather than the link itself (unless the symbolic link is bro‐ ken). Using -L causes the -lname and -ilname predicates always to return false. 

This will probably work: I found in the find man page this diamond: if you are using the -type option you have to change it to the -xtype option:

 l symbolic link; this is never true if the -L option or the -follow option is in effect, unless the symbolic link is broken. If you want to search for symbolic links when -L is in effect, use -xtype. 

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Find All Symbolic Links in Linux

Looking for all the soft links on your Linux system? Here are a couple of methods to find symbolic links.

How do you find a soft link?

You can use the ls command. Some distributions show the links in a different color. The long listing is always reliable because it shows links with l.

lrwxrwxrwx 1 abhishek abhishek 14 Jan 31 18:07 my_link -> redirects.yaml

This is okay if you have a couple of links in the current directory. But what if you want to see the links in a nested directory structure or the entire system?

In this tutorial, I will be showing you two ways to accomplish this mission:

So let’s start with the first one.

Use find command to look for symbolic links

To find the symbolic links using the find command, you can use the following command syntax:

find Target_directory -type l

For example, here, I searched for available symbolic links inside the Links directory:

But by default, the find command will initiate the recursive search and if you want to limit the search to a certain depth, you will have to use the -maxdepth flag.

So let’s say I want to restrict the search to level 1 for the Links directory, I will be using the following:

find Links/ -maxdepth 1 -type l

And if you want detailed output including the file permissions, user groups, etc. then you will have to pair the find command with -ls flag:

find Target_directory -type l -ls

If you want a system-wide search, you can use / in the command.

Use the symlinks utility to find all symbolic links

This tool is what I used while pursuing my internship in networking.

But it does not come pre-installed though. You can install it using your distribution’s package manager. For Ubuntu/Debian, use:

sudo apt install symlinks

Once you are done with the installation, use the given command structure to look for available symbolic links:

symlinks -v target_directory

Here, the -v option gives verbose output.

But by default, the symlinks utility won’t look into subdirectories. Enable recursive search with the -r option:

symlinks -vr target_directory

The output has specific terms. Let me explain them.

• relative indicates that links are relative to the current working directory in which the link resides.
• other_fs means the link is indicating a different filesystem. In my case, it is indicated to the external drive.

Symbolic Links are Easy!

Really, they might sound like a huge deal but we made sure to break the topic bit by bit.

Such as if you are a complete beginner, you can refer to the beginner’s guide to symbolic links:

And if you want to follow them to their origin, you can refer the following guide:

I hope you will find this guide helpful. And if you have any queries or suggestions, be my guest in the comments section.

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symbolic link: find all files that link to this file

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 # ignore leading pathname components 

you may want to recurse, as any of the files pointing to foo.txt may themselves be pointed-at by some other links. ex: A->B->foo.txt, /tmp/C->B->foo.txt, etc.

this can work too if your name component is a parent directory named in the link, by searching find . -lname ‘*foo.dir*’ (matches e.g. file.txt -> ../foo.dir/file.txt )

This answer is really helpful, thanks so much. By the way, if we want to get more info about the results of «find», we can pass the output of «find» to «ls»: find -L /usr -samefile /usr/share/pyshared/lsb_release.py 2>/dev/null | xargs ls -al

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

If using a recent version of GNU find, you can also use the -samefile option with -L for the same effect, without having to look up the inode yourself

If foo is a directory, use ln -di , in one line: find . -follow -inum $(ls -di foo.txt |cut -d» » -f1)

This answer is wrong. A symlink doesn’t have the same inode as its target. This will only work for a file inside a symlinked folder. But this is not what was asked.

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:

To find a specific symlink, just grep :

symlinks -rv . | grep foo.txt 

Never heard of symlinks before (repo). ‘A useful utility for maintainers of FTP sites, CDROMs, and Linux software distributions. It scans directories for symbolic links and lists them on stdout, often revealing flaws in the filesystem tree.’ Great little ancient tool by ancient kernel hacker Mark Lord, the ‘original developer and maintainer of the IDE Performance Package for linux, the Linux IDE Driver subsystem, hdparm’, now maintained by J. Brandt Buckley.

Works great and is fast. Note, however, that you’ll need to do a search in each discrete partition of interest (as symlinks does not reliably (AFAIK) search across what is calls «different filesystems»). Also, symlinks -rv . 2>/dev/null | grep foo.txt may result in «cleaner» output.

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How to List All Symlinks in the Linux Directory

The symbolic link, also known as symlink or soft link, is the file type that can hold the location of a file or directory in any Linux file system. You have created a couple of Symbolic links in your Linux filesystem, and sometimes there comes a need to list all the symbolic links. This post provides you with a step-by-step guide on how to list all symlinks in a Linux filesystem or a specific Linux directory.

From a couple of ways to list all the symbolic links in a Linux directory, we will follow the reliable and best way using the find command.

List All Symbolic Links Using the Find Command

Find command comes in handy when finding any type of file or folder in a Linux operating system.

Syntax

To find the symbolic links in any Linux operating system, the syntax is as follows:

is the location or directory name in which you want to search for the symbolic link,

-type is referencing the file type,

while l is representing the link file type.

Alright, let’s have a look at the examples and see how can we get the symbolic links listed in different ways by going through a couple of examples:

Examples

Using the find command, we can list the symlinks from the entire filesystem or in a specific directory. Let’s take a look at each example:

List All Symlinks From the Entire Filesystem

To list all the symlinks from the entire filesystem, you can execute the following find command by providing the “/” as path:

The “/” in the above command represents the entire file system, and the find command will search for the symbolic links from all over the system and list them out in the terminal.

List All Symlinks in the Current Working Directory

Similarly, if you want to find and list all the symlinks in the current working directory, then simply provide the “.” as a path to the find command as shown below:

In the above command, the “.” tells the find command to find the symlinks in the current working directory.

List All Symlinks in Any Directory

To list all the symlinks in any directory, just provide the directory path to the find command as shown below:

The find command will look for the symbolic links in the /var/www/ directory only and list out all the symbolic links in that directory.

List All Symlinks in a Directory Using Maxdepth Flag

You might have noticed that all the above commands displayed the symbolic links in the desired directory and showed all the symbolic links from the subdirectories, as well.

So, what if you do not want to go into this much depth? You just want to have the symbolic links in the specified directory. The solution to that problem is not rocket science, and we can quickly mention the depth using the maxdepth flag.

For example, to set the search depth to level one, the find command would go like this:

You can witness the output shown in the screenshot given above. The find command has shown only the symbolic links of the current working directory instead of all the subdirectories.

Conclusion

This post has provided multiple ways and gives a brief explanation on how to list all the symbolic links in the Linux filesystem or a specific Linux directory. Using the find command, we have learned to find and list down all the symbolic links and set the maximum depth level using the maxdepth flag. If you want to learn and explore more about the find command, feel free to read the man page of find using the “man find” command.

About the author

Shehroz Azam

A Javascript Developer & Linux enthusiast with 4 years of industrial experience and proven know-how to combine creative and usability viewpoints resulting in world-class web applications. I have experience working with Vue, React & Node.js & currently working on article writing and video creation.

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How to find and list all the symbolic links created for a particular file?

I had created many symbolic links on various paths for a particular file or a directory. I want the whole list of created symbolic links paths (location).

Example:

I created symbolic links for ~/Pictures directory on many directories. How do I list all the symlinks to that ~/Pictures directory? Is that possible? If yes, then how?

You need to search exhaustive, there is no count stored like there is for hard-links. See one of the answers using find.

4 Answers 4

find -L /dir/to/start -xtype l -samefile ~/Pictures 

find -L /dir/to/start -xtype l -samefile ~/Pictures 2>/dev/null 

to get rid of some errors like Permission denied , Too many levels of symbolic links , or File system loop detected which find throws them when doesn’t have the right permissions or other situations.

• -L — Follow symbolic links.
• -xtype l — File is symbolic link
• -samefile name — File refers to the same inode as name . When -L is in effect, this can include symbolic links.

Could the command be modified to find symbolic link that contains a path? e.g. files across the system that may link to ~/Pictures/A, ~/Pictures/A/B/C, or any files in the subdirectories of ~/Pictures>

Very simple, use option -lname :

find / -lname /path/to/original/dir 

-lname pattern File is a symbolic link whose contents match shell pattern pattern. The metacharacters do not treat `/' or `.' specially. If the -L option or the -follow option is in effect, this test returns false unless the symbolic link is broken. 

Note: Remember that symbolic links could be anywhere, which includes a remote system (if you’re sharing files), so you may not be able to locate them all.

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