There are two ways you can find symbolic
link or soft link in UNIX based operating system e.g. Linux, Solaris, BSD
or IBM AIX. First way is by using ls command in
UNIX which display files, directories and links in any directory and other way
is by using UNIX
find command which has ability to search any kind of files e.g. file,
directory or link. In this UNIX
command tutorial we will see examples both of these UNIX command for finding soft link in any directory. If you are new
to UNIX operating system and not familiar with concept of soft
link and hard link, I would recommend to get a good hand on it, as it is
one of the most powerful feature of UNIX based system. One more concept which
is quite important to learn is file
and directory permissions, because UNIX provides different level of
permissions and link inherit permission of destination folder where they are
pointing out. This is also a very popular
Linux interview question asked on both system admin as well as developer
level interview. Any ways Let's start with first example of How to find
symbolic link in UNIX using “ls” command:
ls command to find symbolic link in UNIX systems
when we do ls -lrt in any directory it prints permission
details of each files and directories, if you look carefully for links that
String starats with small L ( l for link).
If you combine output of ls command with grep
and use regular
expression to find all entries which starts with small L than you can easily find all soft link on any
directories. here is full UNIX command example of finding symbolic link using ls and grep command:
java67@blogspot:~ ls -lrt
total 3.0K
-rw-r--r-- 1
java67 Domain Users 79 Jul 19 2011
test.txt
drwxr-xr-x+ 1 java67 Domain Users 0 Jun 15 12:07 unix/
drwxr-xr-x+ 1 java67 Domain Users 0 Sep 19 12:30 java/
lrwxrwxrwx 1
java67 Domain Users 4 Sep 19 12:31 version_1.0 -> java/
lrwxrwxrwx 1
java67 Domain Users 4 Sep 21 13:59 os -> unix/
java67@blogspot:~ ls -lrt |
grep ^l
lrwxrwxrwx 1
java67 Domain Users 4 Sep 19 12:31 version_1.0 -> java/
lrwxrwxrwx 1
java67 Domain Users 4 Sep 21 13:59 os -> unix/
^ character is a special regular
expression which means start of line.
Showing soft link using Find command in Unix
Another way to find all soft links or symbolic links is by using find
command in UNIX. Since all UNIX based operating system e.g. Linux, Solaris
or IBM AIX supports find, its not only available but most powerful way to find
soft link in any directory or sub directory. When you use find command with
option type and specify type as small L ( l for link), it display all soft link
in specified path. for example following example of find command will show all soft
link in current directory and its sub directory :
java67@blogspot:~ find .
-type l
./java/version_1.0
./os
./version_1.0
Here dot (.) denotes current directory. if you
want to limit this search only with current directory and not to sub directory
than you can specify maximum depth as 1 by using -maxdepth option of find
command as shown in below example :
java67@blogspot:~ find .
-maxdepth 1 -type l
./os
./version_1.0
These were two ways to find soft
link or symbolic links in UNIX operating system e.g. Linux, Solaris, or IBM
AIX. I am still searching UNIX command which can find all broken links and will
update this example when I got that. By they way if you guys know any other
ways to find, show or display soft link in any directory or PATH then please
share.
Other UNIX command tutorials you may like
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