How can I remove all symbolic links with a special target?

Question

With the command:

ls -la *

I can list all my symbolic links.

How can I remove all symbolic links which are linked to a special folder?

For example:

In my directory usr/local/bin I have the following entries:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 50 Apr 22 14:52 allneeded -> /usr/local/texlive/2011/bin/x86_64-linux/allneeded
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 47 Apr 22 14:52 amstex -> /usr/local/texlive/2011/bin/x86_64-linux/amstex
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 24 Apr 23 19:09 arara -> /home/marco/.arara/arara

Now I want to remove all links with the path /usr/local/texlive/

Answer 1

You can use this to delete all symbolic links:

find -type l -delete

with modern find versions.

On older find versions it may have to be:

find -type l -exec rm {} \;
# or
find -type l -exec unlink {} \;

To limit to a certain link target, assuming none of the paths contain any newline character:

 find -type l | while IFS= read -r lnkname; do if [ "$(readlink '$lnkname')" == "/your/exact/path" ]; then rm -- "$lnkname"; fi; done

or nicely formatted

 find -type l |
 while IFS= read -r lnkname;
 do
   if [ "$(readlink '$lnkname')" = "/your/exact/path" ];
   then
     rm -- "$lnkname"
   fi
 done

The if could of course also include a more complex condition such as matching a pattern with grep.

---

Tailored to your case:

find -type l | while IFS= read -r lnk; do if (readlink "$lnk" | grep -q '^/usr/local/texlive/'); then rm "$lnk"; fi; done

or nicely formatted:

find -type l | while IFS= read -r lnk
do
  if readlink "$lnk" | grep -q '^/usr/local/texlive/'
  then
    rm "$lnk"
  fi
done

Answer 2

With a modern find that supports -lname:

find /usr/local/bin -lname '/usr/local/texlive/*' -delete

should do it.

Answer 3

The find solution is great.

Just in case your find doesn't support -lname, here's another way that uses only shell and readlink.

cd /usr/local/bin
for f in *; do
  case "$(readlink "$f")" in /usr/local/texlive/*)
    rm "$f"
    ;;
  esac
done