Remove symlinks originating from specific directory

Question

I have an "install.sh" that installs my personal scripts:

find /home/Steven -name '*.sh' -exec ln -s -t /usr/local/bin {} +

I would like to make an "uninstall.sh" that removes the symbolic links created by "install.sh". I wrote this:

for z in /usr/local/bin/*
do
  if [ -h "$z" ]
  then rm "$z"
  fi
done

but it removes all symlinks, not just ones where the target is under "/home/Steven".

Answer 1

If you have GNU or BSD find, this should do it:

find -lname '/home/Steven/*' -delete

Answer 2

You could modify your script and use grep and either readlink or realpath to extract the files in the desired subdirectory, e.g.:

for z in /usr/local/bin/*
do
  if [ -h "${z}" ] && readlink -f "${z}" | grep -q '^/home/Steven'
      then rm "${z}"
  fi
done

The readlink -f command returns the full path to the file pointed to by the symbolic link. The grep -q '^/home/Steven' command returns true if the path begins with the substring '/home/Steven' and returns false otherwise.

A word of caution: there is some ambiguity related to symbolic links that could affect the outcome here. The readlink -f command will resolve the link recursively, so the above command would fail if the file in the /home/Steven directory were itself a symbolic link point outside of this directory. If this isn't the desired behavior then you might want to use the realpath command instead.

Answer 3

To cover for the case where the links may be relative and to check that their canonical path is within /home/Steven, with zsh:

rm /usr/local/bin/*(@e{'[[ $REPLY:A = /home/Steven/* ]]'})

Where:

• @ glob qualifier that matches on symlinks:
• e{code} glob qualifier that matches based on the evaluation of the code (where $REPLY contains the path of the file to check)
• $REPLY:A expands to the absolute path of $REPLY.