Renaming files works, but soft links point to the old names. How can I fix that?

Question

For example, I'm renaming many files inside a tree like this:

[bash]$ for file in `find . -name "*gsf*"`; do `mv $file ${file/gsf/msf}`; done

That renames all the instances of "gsf" in file names matching gsf to "msf", but softlinks continue to point to now-non-existent files containing "gsf".

For example, this is what happens after the rename:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 trusktr users     20 Apr 25 14:39 libmsf-1.so -> libgsf-1.so.114.0.23
lrwxrwxrwx 1 trusktr users     20 Apr 25 14:39 libmsf-1.so.114 -> libgsf-1.so.114.0.23
-rwxr-xr-x 1 trusktr users 265584 Apr 21 04:41 libmsf-1.so.114.0.23

As you can see, the soft links point to libgsf-1.so.114.0.23 which doesn't exist anymore because it was renamed to libmsf-1.so.114.0.23.

What can I do so that the rename also happens to the soft link pointers?

Answer 1

Nothing; that's what makes them symbolic links, you need to deal with them yourself. Hard links reference the actual index node ("inode") in the filesystem, and will therefore remain valid; this is exactly why you would use hard instead of symbolic links in this case.

Answer 2

Aside from the technical explanation, already answered. You can change where the symbolic links point to:

1. Find them with find . -type l
2. Change their target with ln -sfT target link_name

The options -sfT must be specified to repoint symbolic links without surprises.

Answer 3

find and ln are good.
readlink is also good.

Answer 4

Based on @C2H5OH's and @user1277476's answers, I came up with a solution:

$ for file in `find . -type l`; do link=$(readlink $file); ln -sfT ${link//gsf/msf} $file; done