Move directory recursive and leave symlinks at source Post: 303009424

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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Move directory recursive and leave symlinks at source Post 303009424 by rbatte1 on Thursday 14th of December 2017 09:15:03 AM

12-14-2017

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Can you tell us a bit more about why you ned to do this? Is it a space issue or are you moving from using one SAN to another perhaps? That might colour our thinking rather than us guessing and giving (perhaps wildly inaccurate) guesses about what is best.

If it is read-only, then you would be better to copy the data to the new location. Then at an agreed time you can rename the top level directory and create the symbolic link. There will be the time between the rename and the creation of the link that things might not work but that should be a pretty small interval.

Perhaps an option (as root):

Code:

cd /original
tar -cvf - . | (cd /target ; tar -xvpf - )                 # Will run for quite a while

# When you are ready to switch
mv /original /original.old ; ln -s /target /original       # Rename the original and almost immediately create the link

When you are happy, remove /original.old but have a search through to make sure that there are no symbolic links inside it that a find ..... or rm -rf might follow. Take extra care at this point.

If you are moving SAN and assuming you have a volume manager, I would recommend that you attach the new LUNs and add them in to the old volume group. Then you can use the volume manager to firstly mirror the logical volumes then remove the old ones. You could use a volume manager to move the logical volume but if they are large I would always recommend a mirror and delete. It takes a little longer but you have less to worry about if there is an interruption. At worst you might have to drop the partial new copy and start again.

Like I suggested, very different options depending on what you are trying to achieve. Can you also confirm your OS and version with the output from uname -a (pasted in CODE tags) so we use the correct tools.

You also might have to consider SE-Linux, other security packages and Access Control Lists. Do you know if you have any of those?

I hope that this helps or we can continue the discussion.

Robin

rbatte1

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

symlinks

SYMLINKS(1)						      General Commands Manual						       SYMLINKS(1)

NAME

       symlinks - symbolic link maintenance utility

SYNOPSIS

       symlinks [ -cdorstv ] dirlist

DESCRIPTION

       symlinks  is  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.

       Each link is output with a classification of relative, absolute, dangling, messy, lengthy, 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 specified.

       lengthy	links  are  links  which use "../" more than necessary in the path (eg.  /bin/vi -> ../bin/vim) These are only detected when -s is
       specified, and are only cleaned up when -c is also specified.

       other_fs are those links whose target currently resides on a different filesystem from where symlinks was run (most useful with -r ).

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, and, if -s was also specified, then lengthy links are also shortened.  Links affected by -c are prefixed  with  changed  in  the
	      output.

       -d     causes dangling links to be removed.

       -o     fix links on other filesystems encountered while recursing.  Normally, other filesystems encountered are not modified by symlinks.

       -r     recursively operate on subdirectories within the same filesystem.

       -s     causes lengthy links to be detected.

       -t     is used to test for what symlinks would do if -c were specified, but without really changing anything.

       -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@pobox.com>, the original developer and maintainer of the IDE Performance Package for linux,
       the Linux IDE Driver subsystem, hdparm, and a current day libata hacker.

SEE ALSO

       symlink(2)

Version 1.4							   October 2008 						       SYMLINKS(1)

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