One of the otherwise great answers states:
There is no command to retarget a symbolic link, all you can do is remove it and create another one.
The rename
command's -s
option will "rename a symbolic link target, not the symbolic links itself". It will also operate on multiple symbolic links at once. This seems to be the behavior the OP requested.
The rename
command is part of the util-linux package and is available from https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/. It has been available since at least June 2011.
OP said:
I want a command which will find all the symlinks and relink to the same places but underneath /mnt/home instead of /home
The rename
command can do that and it can do it for multiple files (symbolic links) at once. Unfortunately, the OP uses a, b, c, d, e as example filenames. Those names don't seem realistic, so I won't use them in my answer. (If the OP is working with multiple subdirectories the solution may be more complex than what I'm presenting, but I still think rename
is a very convenient tool for this general requirement, and it can be combined with other tools such as find ... -execdir ...
.)
I did just use rename
to fix multiple broken symbolic links as shown below. This is the "before" listing from ls
:
second.files -> first.files.tar.zst
second.files.sig -> first.files.tar.zst.sig
The targets first.files.tar.zst*
do not exist. This is analogous to the OP's situation.
I used this command to fix all the broken symbolic links:
rename -s 'first' 'second' second.files*
The two single-quoted arguments apply to the target. The last argument, second.files*
selects the links upon which to operate. Those symbolic links are not renamed. Due to the use of the -s
option, the search/replace operation is performed on the targets.
Here is the "after" listing from ls
after running the above rename
command
second.files -> second.files.tar.zst
second.files.sig -> second.files.tar.zst.sig
The links have been "relinked" and they work correctly now.
Here is an example of using it to relink any symbolic links that has the pattern "somelinks*" in its name where we want to change the target location from /home
to /mnt/home
.
rename -s '/home' '/mnt/home' somelinks*
The man page suggests that the single quotes are mandatory. In this case, multiple broken links matching the pattern somelinks*
were fixed, which means they were retargeted to point to the correct location. The symbolic links name itself was not changed, but the file it pointed to was changed.
It would be better to use relative symbolic links.
I'm sure the person who wrote the above statement had good justification. However, we actually prefer absolute symbolic links in our environment (where we utilize network shares). If the directories on the clients and fileserver are laid out consistently, absolute symbolic links will work across file systems and even over network shares. Within our team, they provide for a very consistent and robust navigation solution. We can all share consistent file paths with each other. Haven't had problems with this approach over the last 8 or so years. But if your situation is different, by all means consider relative symlinks as Gilles suggested.