symlinks

scan/change symbolic links

Symlinks is a simple tool that helps find and remedy problematic symbolic links on a system.

Description

Symlinks scans directories for symbolic links, identifying dangling, relative, absolute, messy, and other_fs links. It can also change absolute links to relative within a given filesystem.

Installation

Source:

$ cd path/to/the/extracted/source
$ make
$ make install  # or 'sudo make install' if you get an error

If you would like to install to some other location besides the default of /usr/local, which usually requires admin privileges, then add PREFIX=/some/other/path to the end of your make install. For example:

$ make install PREFIX=$HOME/.local

Pre-compiled binaries:

Many Linux distributions already have a version of Mark Lord's original symlinks in their repositories; see https://pkgs.org/search/?q=symlinks for details.

If you use MacPorts, you can sudo port install symlinks.

Usage

Scan:

$ symlinks -r [path]

Show all symlinks:

$ symlinks -rv [path]

Convert absolute symlink to relative:

$ symlinks -rc [path]

More options:

$ symlinks -h

Changes

v1.4.3

• Fixed LFS support bug that caused erratic behavior on 32-bit systems.

v1.4.2

• Reformatted for readability roughly based on Google style guide.
• Fixed loss of precision due to implicit type conversion.
• Minor documentation updates.

v1.4-1

• Added Mac OS X compatibility.

v1.4

• Incorporate patches from Fedora.

v1.3

• More messy-link fixes, new -o flag for other_fs.

v1.2

• Added -s flag to shorten links with redundant path elements.
• Also includes code to remove excess slashes from paths.

Credit

Symlinks was created by Mark Lord mlord@pobox.com.
Maintained by J. Brandt Buckley brandt@runlevel1.com.