When I perform a ls on a directory I get the following:

----rwxr-x 1 JFRANKMAN 0 1599570 Apr 22 2006 axis.jar

If I understand this correctly, the "1" after the permissions section and before the ownership section shows that there is one link attached to the axis.jar file. If this is correct how can I find the location of the link that points to the axis.jar file? In other words is there a way to find all links for a given file?

This "1" is the number of hardlinks, not symlinks. You need to understand the concepts of inodes, hardlinks and symlinks. Take a look at this for example.

In other words is there a way to find all links for a given file?
Only thing comes up is bruteforce FS traversal. Crude example follows. Finish off by narrowing down search area, apply regex or iname search, or use a grep pipe.

And to answer the question about finding the (hard-)links...
ls -li will give you the files inode, which you then can use
with
find / -inum <number>


Cheers,
Tink

ls -li will give you the files inode, which you then can use with find / -inum <number>
I have a file in /etc with inode number 88216 and at least two relative symlinks, but "find /etc -inum 88216" doesn't show a darn thing?

That's because symlinks and hard-links aren't the same?


Cheers,
Tink

Indeed. Hardlinks share inodes, symlinks don't use inodes at all. That's why hardlinks cannot cross filesystem boundaries and symlinks can.

In short, think of symlinks as small "text" files that only hold the path to where the symlinks point. If the linked target is gone, then the link points to nothing. The "path" stored can be anywhere, in any filesystem.

When a file is created on disk (ie "touch"), it gets one hardlink in the directory where you created the file. This hardlink is nothing else than an entry in the directory's table of contents that lists both the filename and the inode of the file on disk.
When another hardlink is created (so another entry in some directory's table of contents, with a reference to the same inode/physical file), the inode reference is "shared" between both directories.
When any hardlink is deleted, the number of links (viewable by ls) decreases. If it reaches 0, then the file is "erased" from disk and no longer accessible.

That's because symlinks and hard-links aren't the same?
So yours just isnt the definitive answer, right?

You can use find to produce a list of symbolic links and targets:
find /path/to/dir -type l -printf "%p\t%l\n"

find /path/to/dir -type l -printf "%p\t%l\n"
Shouldn't that be %h/%l\n so you can do "find /some/dir -type l -printf "%h/%l\n" 2>/dev/null | xargs -iL readlink -f 'L'"? Looks like a less convoluted version of post #3.

It's the answer that relates to the reference count in the
output of ls. He didn't know they aren't symlinks. ;}


Cheers,
Tink