SYMLINKS

Section: Maintenance Commands (8)
Updated: Sept 1994
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NAME

symlinks - scan/change symbolic links

SYNOPSIS

symlinks [ -cdrv ] dirlist

DESCRIPTION

symlinks scans directories for symbolic links and lists them on stdout. Each link is prefixed with a classification of relative, absolute, dangling, messy, or other_fs.

relative links are those expressed as paths relative to the directory in which the links reside, usually independent of the mount point of the filesystem.

absolute links are those given as an absolute path from the root directory as indicated by a leading slash (/).

dangling links are those for which the target of the link does not currently exist. This commonly occurs for absolute links when a filesystem is mounted at other than its customary mount point (such as when the normal root filesystem is mounted at /mnt after booting from alternative media).

messy links are links which contain unnecessary slashes or dots in the path. These are cleaned up as well when -c is used to convert absolute links to relative.

other_fs are those whose target currently resides on a different filesystem.

OPTIONS

-c: convert absolute links (within the same filesystem) to relative links. This permits links to maintain their validity regardless of the mount point used for the filesystem -- a desirable setup in most cases. This option also causes any messy links to be cleaned up. Links affected by -c are prefixed with changed in the output.
-d: causes dangling links to be removed.
-r: recursively operate on subdirectories within the same filesystem.
-v: show all symbolic links. By default, relative links are not shown unless -v is specified.

BUGS

symlinks does not recurse or change links across filesystems.

AUTHOR

symlinks has been written by Mark Lord <mlord@bnr.ca>, the developer and maintainer of the IDE Performance Package for linux.

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Time: 16:00:04 GMT, November 05, 2024