Dead sym links

Hangdog42 · 10-01-2003, 01:30 PM

I'm trying to get Sentinel installed on my box, and the initialization keeps tripping over dead sym links. Is there a way to globally delete the dead links or do I need to do it one link at a time?

ehdwuld · 10-01-2003, 01:48 PM

um
imho
global commands and doing things " in masse"
are a little scary
cuase you have to be root to make such sweeps

one typo

and whammo

losts o stuff broke

Hangdog42 · 10-01-2003, 05:15 PM

Quote:

one typo

and whammo

losts o stuff broke

Well, yeah.....That is the fun of linux. We are all just one rm * -rf away from a nice, clean hard disk.

In this case however, I'm trying to find broken sym links. Since the target of the link is no longer there, if I delete the link there should be no loss.

Looking_Lost · 10-01-2003, 06:38 PM

This after *cough* very limited testing seems to do the job if that's what you're meaning

Code:

#!/bin/bash


#cd to the top-level directory you are searching

fileList=`find -type l`

for i in $fileList
do

if [ -f  $i ]
 then
   echo "$i still points to a file"
 else
   echo "$i no longer points to a file"
#uncomment to delete   rm $i
 fi

done

Hangdog42 · 10-01-2003, 08:39 PM

Many, many thanks Looking_Lost, that is exactly what I was looking for!

<edit>
I did a bit more testing and for links pointing to files, it works perfectly. However, when the link points to a directory, the script correctly decides that the link does not point to a file and removes it, even though the directory exists.

In the end, I dumped the output to a file and investigated before I deleted.

Again, many thanks Looking_Lost
</edit>

Looking_Lost · 10-02-2003, 04:35 AM

Yeah, it could be quite dangerous as it could end up deleting links to other types of files without further checking so I definitely wouldn't run it on / , but do what you did output, it's results to a file but the basic idea is there.