How to find all symbolic links pointing to any file/directory inside a given directory

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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"

Answer 3

With zsh:

printf '%s\n' /dir2/**/*(D@e'([[ $REPLY:P = /dir1(/*|) ]])')