I have a large directory with many files and directories. A few of those MAY be targets to symlinks. I don't really know if they exist much less which ones they are. How do I find those?

ls -l will color its output and you will see. You can use find to identify links. And there are a lot of other ways using test, perl, python, shell, whatever.

You certainly don't understand the question.

There was a recent thread on this here...suggest the OP search for it. It's been in the last couple of weeks and contained considerable discussion.

If I understood that thread, it's not possible to know that a given file is a target of a softlink. It may be possible to detect targets of hard links.

Do you want only the targets?

Or also the symlink?

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you certainly can't explain what do you really need. https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...re-4175646996/

did I miss something?

Now that is a useful answer! I knew that there had to be some unix tool that would make that task easier. I was just hoping that someone would point it out. Thank you!

I also found a program called symlinks on the Debian repository that will do exactly that. It takes a while to scan all potential directories, but once I have that report, grep will tell me exactly what I need.

Solved. Thank you again, Turbocapitalist. Nice nickname, btw.

If you are interested in knowing which symlinks are pointing to your directory target files as well you can use the following:
This is probably what pan64 meant in post #2

Or

from grammatical point of view the question "how do I find those" may mean both "how do I find those symlinks" or "how do I find those files".
from the other hand we need to scan the whole directory tree and collect all the symlinks and finally print links, targets or both. That is completely irrelevant. I mean technically. What Turbocapitalist posted is most probably the slowest solution, implementing the same algorithm in perl/python - or bash will do the job too. Including the "postprocessing" mentioned in post #7.

And the problem is still not completely solved, because there can be links pointing to nowhere and there can be link chains pointing finally to a file (or dir or ?), there can be link loops ...

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As for the links pointing to nowhere, they can be culled or identified. See --canonicalize-existing or --canonicalize-missing for readlink. In the case of a loop, it gets treated as a link with a missing target.

Edit: agreed about perl being faster to run.

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