Showing a file's symbolic links


 
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# 1  
Old 06-15-2009
Question Showing a file's symbolic links

ls -l shows the number of links for each file. Is there a command that will show the link sources for a specific file? Running find on the entire filesystem and doing a little Perl "magic" is the only method I'm aware of. I'm running SunOS 5.8.

Thanks.
# 2  
Old 06-15-2009
I'm not sure about SunOS but try searching "man find" for "type".

Code:
find / -type l

# 3  
Old 06-16-2009
Humm doesn't it show as:
symbolic_name -> ./real_name
# 4  
Old 06-16-2009
Quote:
Originally Posted by laurentv
Humm doesn't it show as:
symbolic_name -> ./real_name
Try doing find / -type l -ls
# 5  
Old 06-16-2009
For hard links (where the link count is greater than one). Two stage process.

Code:
Find the inode number for the file:

ls -laid /usr/bin/ls
  2389 -r-xr-xr-x   7 bin        bin          28672 Nov 14  2000 /usr/bin/ls

Find all files with that inode number within the filesystem (-xdev may be -mount in some versions of find).

find /usr/ -xdev -inum 2389 -exec ls -laid {} \;
  2389 -r-xr-xr-x   7 bin        bin          28672 Nov 14  2000 /usr/bin/l
  2389 -r-xr-xr-x   7 bin        bin          28672 Nov 14  2000 /usr/bin/lc
  2389 -r-xr-xr-x   7 bin        bin          28672 Nov 14  2000 /usr/bin/ll
  2389 -r-xr-xr-x   7 bin        bin          28672 Nov 14  2000 /usr/bin/ls
  2389 -r-xr-xr-x   7 bin        bin          28672 Nov 14  2000 /usr/bin/lsf
  2389 -r-xr-xr-x   7 bin        bin          28672 Nov 14  2000 /usr/bin/lsr
  2389 -r-xr-xr-x   7 bin        bin          28672 Nov 14  2000 /usr/bin/lsx

# 6  
Old 06-16-2009
methyl:

I tried your advice and the results are confusing.

The example directory that I'm using has a link count of four. If I search the same file system for links to this directory's inode I get one result: the directory itself. If I search / I get two results: the directory itself and a file in another file system that has absolutely nothing to do with this directory.

What am I missing here; am I misunderstanding link counts?
Could my directory be linked to from another (backup) server?

-----Post Update-----

My Unix admin gave me an idea and further searching of the web confirmed this:

Quote:
...the link count of a directory is 2 + the number of subdirectories in the given directory.
I apologize for the misleading title "Showing a file's symbolic links."

Based on methyl's method, it appears that this directory has nothing linked to it--which makes sense; I wasn't expecting anything to be. If a directory is linked, the above method should work.

Last edited by effigy; 06-16-2009 at 02:36 PM..
# 7  
Old 06-17-2009
My method only works for files.

As far as I know there is no way to hard link directories.

The "link count" field in a directory is the number of directory entries directly below that directory (including "." and ".."). This agrees with your Unix Admin.

The only way I know to find soft links pointing to a directory is a blunt search for soft links across all filesystems as described in another post and, then expanding the list to show where each link points. This can get rather complicated if your system has soft links which are relative links!
 
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