How can I find symbolic links

rickh · 05-26-2005, 08:16 AM

Don't know whether this is a Debian specific question or not, but I did it on my Debian system, so this is probably a good place to start.

I created a symbolic link to JAVA_HOME by typing this command at the root prompt:
ln -s /usr/lib/j2re1.4-sun/ /usr/lib/java

Works beautifully, and since I still remember it's name, I can review it using readlink or ls -l

My question is, how can I get a list of ALL such symbolic links on my system?

jw2328 · 05-26-2005, 08:25 AM

A short tutorial

http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Symlink

rickh · 05-26-2005, 09:06 AM

From the link you gave me:

Quote:

Finding
Using ls -l to locate symbolic links is easy. They are shown as
lrwxrwxrwx 1 username groupname # 2004-03-08 15:55 foo -> bar

Symbolic links can also be located using
find -type l.

Neither of those techniques found my symlink /usr/lib/java

Yet both ls -l, and readlink return the correct information about it, if I specify the link name.

I want to find symlinks that I have forgotten, or never knew, existed.

Ahhh! but the tutorial also mentions a program named 'symlinks' (which I installed) and it works marvelously.