Who/What is using my Symbolic Link
 

on Friday we moved user home folders between NAS volumes, immediately afterwards we started seeing our application hanging and not responding. To restore service we created a symbolic link directing home folder calls to the new location.

Now that we have service restored we need to clean things up and make the transition complete, how do we find who/what is using the symbolic link? My goal is to identify the users/usage, correct the problem, and then monitor to ensure we don't see additional references before we remove the link. Measure/Adjust/Measure - Imaging that :)

For those that will ask "Why remove the link"?
(a) Keeping the system clean and easy to sustain is the right thing to do.
(b) The link lives on the old NAS volume that needs to be decommissioned.

I use lsof sometimes like so

Thanks for the suggestion, it gave me a good start!

You are welcome!

I would simply grep in the source-code directories. (Or even object-code.)

Hello - as a follow-up to this it looks like the lsof is resulting the files locked weather the user is following the symbolic link or not.

Good suggestion, however this is a vendors application with compiled code and configuration files stored in multiple locations including a database. As we hunt for all the places we need to update I need a way to monitor the users we are testing with to see if we have found all the settings before removing the symbolic link for all our users.

What if instead of using the symlink you use "mount --bind" to remount the new home directory in the old location? lsof might behave as you hope in that case, not sure since ultimately they are still using the same files.