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On this question or on this one (for example) you will get solutions on how to look for symlinks pointing to a given directory (let's call it /dir1), while I am interested to symbolic links possibly pointing to any file/folder inside /dir1.

I want to delete such directory but I am not sure that I am safe to do so, as on an other directory (let's call it /dir2), I may have symlinks pointing to inner parts of /dir1.

Further, I may have created these symlinks using absolute or relative paths. My only help is that I know the symlinks I want to check are on a mounted filesystem, on /dir2.

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20

You can find all the symbolic links using:

find / -type l

you might want to run this as root in order to get to every place on the disc.

You can expand these using readlink -f to get the full path of the link and you should be able to grep the output against the target directory that you are considering for deletion:

find / -type l -exec readlink -f {} + | grep -F /dir2

Using find / -type l -printf '%l\n' doesn't work as you get relative links like ../tmp/xyz which might be pointing to your target dir, but are not matched because they are not fully expanded.

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    In case of subtree it can be useful to follow symlinks: find -L /subtree -xtype l -exec readlink -f {} + – ruvim Nov 30 '17 at 11:52
  • What does the + do here? – Liam Jul 21 '20 at 15:24
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    @Liam It tells find that the -exec is finished and that multiple arguments should be passed to the command (readlink) at the position of {} (you can also finish with ; (which needs to be escaped in many shells), to invoke the command with a single argument, which is much slower to execute. – Anthon Jul 21 '20 at 20:03
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In my case, the accepted answer wasn't useful (because it didn't output the link source). Here is what worked for me.

I worked around it using two -exec clauses:

find /home/ -type l -exec readlink -nf {} ';' -exec echo " -> {}" ';' | grep "/dir2"
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    This works, but the arrow (->) is misleading, it should point from right to left (<-). – Attila Csipak Oct 5 '20 at 13:54
  • Rather than flipping the arrow, this would print the expected output: find /home/ -type l -printf '%p -> ' -exec readlink -f {} ';' | grep "/dir2" – MichaelK Feb 23 at 20:56
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With zsh:

printf '%s\n' /dir2/**/*(D@e'([[ $REPLY:P = /dir1(/*|) ]])')
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Depending on your circumstances, you could delete the directory, then delete any resultant invalid symlinks with the following:

find -xtype l -delete

The xtype test returns 'l' if the symlink is broken.

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