Linux get symlink path

linux — [Solved-4 Solutions] How to see full symlink path ? — ubuntu — red hat — debian — linux server — linux pc

Related Searches to — linux — linux tutorial — How to see full symlink path ?

linux red hat debian opensuse ubuntu arch linux mandrake get link linux computer linux pc linux server linux desktop learn linux red hat linux red hat enterprise linux linux software linux tutorial linux operating system suse linux linux download linux os linux ubuntu vmware linux lunix linux windows linux news linux usb linux commands unix linux linux version what is linux linux centos linux ftp linux view symbolic link path find symbolic link target windows bash get symlink target ansible readlink aix readlink delete symbolic links windows how to tell if a folder is a symbolic link windows windows get symlink info list junction points windows find junction windows list junction point show junction points cmd

INTERVIEW TIPS
• Final Year Projects
• HR Interview Q&A
• GD Interview
• Resume Samples
• Engineering
• Aptitude
• Reasoning
• Company Questions
• Country wise visa
• Interview Dress Code CAREER GUIDANCE
• Entrance Exam
• Colleges
• Admission Alerts
• ScholarShip
• Education Loans
• Letters
• Learn Languages

World’s No 1 Animated self learning Website with Informative tutorials explaining the code and the choices behind it all.

Источник

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.

Источник

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.

Источник

Bash: how to get real path of a symlink? [duplicate]

Is it possible, executing a file symlinked in /usr/local/bin folder, to get the absolute path of original script? Well, .. I know where original file is, and I know it because I am linkging it. But, . I want this script working, even if I move original source code (and symlink).

coreutils isn’t installed by default on every system that includes bash. stat is more consistently available, but it too has different usage depending on your operating system.

3 Answers 3

readlink is not a standard command, but it’s common on Linux and BSD, including OS X, and it’s the most straightforward answer to your question. BSD and GNU readlink implementations are different, so read the documentation for the one you have.

If readlink is not available, or you need to write a cross-platform script that isn’t bound to a specific implementation:

If the symlink is also a directory, then

will get you into the dereferenced directory, so

echo "I am in $(cd -P "$symlinkdir" && pwd)" 

will echo the fully dereferenced directory. That said, cd -P dereferences the entire path, so if you have more than one symlink in the same path you can have unexpected results.

If the symlink is to a file, not a directory, you may not need to dereference the link. Most commands follow symlinks harmlessly. If you simply want to check if a file is a link, use test -L .

Источник

Find out symbolic link target via command line

Locked. This question and its answers are locked because the question is off-topic but has historical significance. It is not currently accepting new answers or interactions.

ln -s /root/Public/mytextfile.txt /root/Public/myothertextfile.txt 

9 Answers 9

Use the -f flag to print the canonicalized version. For example:

readlink -f /root/Public/myothertextfile.txt 

-f, --canonicalize canonicalize by following every symlink in every component of the given name recursively; all but the last component must exist 

To get this working on Mac OS X, brew install coreutils . This installs basic gnu versions of commands prefixed with the letter g , i.e. greadlink -f somefile

Using -f gave me the information that I wanted, i.e. resolving multiple symlinks and showing the end target.

on Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS (Bionic Beaver) the manpages of readlink have a note saying «Note realpath(1) is the preferred command to use for canonicalization functionality.»

readlink is the command you want. You should look at the man page for the command. Because if you want to follow a chain of symbolic links to the actual file, then you need the -e or -f switch:

$ ln -s foooooo zipzip # fooooo doesn't actually exist $ ln -s zipzip zapzap $ # Follows it, but doesn't let you know the file doesn't actually exist $ readlink -f zapzap /home/kbrandt/scrap/foooooo $ # Follows it, but file not there $ readlink -e zapzap $ # Follows it, but just to the next symlink $ readlink zapzap zipzip 

ls -l /root/Public/myothertextfile.txt 

but readlink would be preferred for use in a script rather than parsing ls .

If you want to show the source and the destination of the link, try stat -c%N files* . E.g.

$ stat -c%N /dev/fd/* ‘/dev/fd/0’ -> ‘/dev/pts/4’ ‘/dev/fd/1’ -> ‘/dev/pts/4’ 

It’s not good for parsing (use readlink for that), but it shows link name and destination, without the clutter of ls -l

-c can be written —format and %N means “quoted file name with dereference if symbolic link”.

The readlink is a good thing, but GNU-specific and non cross platform. I used to write cross platform scripts for /bin/sh , therefore I’d use something like:

 ls -l /root/Public/myothertextfile.txt | awk '' 

 ls -l /root/Public/myothertextfile.txt | awk -F"-> " '' 

but these needs to be tested on different platforms. I think they’ll work, but don’t 100% sure for ls output format.

The result of ls can also be parsed within bash without depending on an external command like awk , sed or perl .

This bash_realpath function, resolves the final destination of a link (link→link→link→final):

bash_realpath() < # print the resolved path # @params # 1: the path to resolve # @return # >&1: the resolved link path local path="$" while [[ -L $ && "$(ls -l "$")" =~ -\>\ (.*) ]] do path="$" done echo "$" > 

If you can’t use readlink , then parsing the result of ls -l could be done like this.

The normal result would be:

ls -l /root/Public/myothertextfile.txt lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 30 Jan 1 12:00 /root/Public/myothertextfile.txt -> /root/Public/mytextfile.txt 

So we want to replace everything before » -> » and the arrow included. We could use sed for this:

ls -l /root/Public/myothertextfile.txt | sed 's/^.* -> //' /root/Public/mytextfile.txt 

The question is not accurate enough to give a simple answer as the one of brian-brazil:

will indeed dereference every symlink involved in the path construct to the final target behind some_path .

But one level of cascading symlinks is just a particular case among others in a system, the general case being N levels of cascading symlinks. Look at the following on my system:

$ rwhich emacs /usr/bin/emacs /etc/alternatives/emacs /usr/bin/emacs24-x 

rwhich is my own recursive implementation of which that prints all of the intermediate cascading symlinks (to stderr) down to the final target (to stdout).

Then if I want to know what is:

the target of symlink /usr/bin/emacs**, the obvious answer to me is /etc/alternatives/emacs as returned by:

readlink $(which emacs) readlink /usr/bin/emacs 

readlink -f $(which emacs) readlink -f /usr/bin/emacs rwhich emacs 2>/dev/null 

Источник