UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

how do i get the list of symbolic link names for a particular file programatically

b_u_n,
IN which Unix version? what variant? for which symbolic link names? Unable to identify your question as its to narrow. Pls refine your question again, with much possible data that you could provide. Recomendded to check the FAQ page too.

You can use this find command to show all link type files in a certain directory.


find /some/directory -type l -print # this is the letter "l" not the number 1.

Should work on all types of UNIX with little syntax problems.

What i meant was ....

Say i have a file called a.txt

now i create links to this files
....
ln a.txt link1.txt
ln a.txt link2.txt
and so on .

note that this links can be in different directories too.

my question is , how do i get the names of all the links that a.txt have ?

I need this on AIX and Mac OS X . and want to use this in a shell script.

Thanks

I know that you can find files that have X number of links.

From the Manpage. Use these with the find command.

-links n (some number of links)

-linkedto path
True if the file is the same physical file as the file specified by path (i.e., linked to path). This primary is similar to -inum, but correctly detects when a file is hard-linked to path, even when multiple file systems are searched.


I thought that I had heard of a way to find the links to a file, but I can't remember right now.