Hello,

I'm getting frustrated attempting to write this shell script.

What it needs to do is parse all the symbolic links in the /home/sites directory and change the links so instead of being linked to /home/sites/some/path/ it's linked to ./some/path.

Any ideas?

What books, etc. are you using to learn shell scripting?

The way to develop a script is to first test the various commands to make sure they do what you want. The first thing is to find all the lines in "ls -l" that begin with "l"
ls -l | grep "^l"

AFAIK, you cannot modify the target of a link--I think you have to delete them and make new ones. One straightforward way would be to store the link name & target in an array. Then read the array and process the target to create the new name. Finally, issue ln -s for each element of the array.

To grab the link names, etc. you can use awk:
Here is a sample output from the command above:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 mherring users 3 2007-06-04 12:03 das -> DAS
The link name and the target are simply the 8th and 10th fields (make sure awk is using "space" as the delimiter)

I hope this at least gets you started in the right direction.

How does your script look so far?

PS:

Instead of modifying existing links, how about simply deleting all of them and creating new ones by looping thru the TARGETs?

You will need to remove the link and recreate it. Moving a link only moves the source, not the target of the link. Hope this helps.

#!/bin/sh
# Use at your own risk. Feel free to modify and share.

# used /etc to test the script since I don't have a "/home/sites" directory
SRCDIR=/etc
#SRCDIR=/home/sites

# save the current directory so we can come back.
CURRENT_DIR=`pwd`

# change to the directory containing the links
cd $SRCDIR

# List any links in the directory, get their target and source, and then see if
# the target is is in the source directory (so we can make it relative)
for FILE in `ls -la $SRCDIR | grep "^l" | awk '{print $10 ":" $8}'| grep "^$SRCDIR"`; do
TARGET=`echo $FILE | awk -F: '{print $1}'`
SRC=`echo $FILE | awk -F: '{print $2}'`

echo $SRC '->' $TARGET

# I'm not exactly sure how you want to change TARGET to NEW_TARGET
# so I'm guessing you simply want to remove the source directory from the
# beginning of the path.

sep=$'\001' # Use Control-a as separator, it will never be in a dir name
replace=.

NEW_TARGET=`echo $TARGET | sed "s${sep}^${SRCDIR}${sep}$replace${sep}"`

echo $SRC '->' $NEW_TARGET

# commenting out the dangerous stuff until you test it.
# rm $SRC
# ln -s $NEW_TARGET $SRC
done

cd $CURRENT_DIR