symlinks - symbolic link maintenance utility
SYNOPSIS
symlinks [ -cdrstv ] dirlist
DESCRIPTION
symlinks is a useful utility for maintainers of FTP sites,
CDROMs, and Linux software distributions. It scans direc
tories for symbolic links and lists them on stdout, often
revealing flaws in the filesystem tree.
Each link is output with a classification of relative,
absolute, dangling, messy, lengthy, or other_fs.
relative links are those expressed as paths relative to
the directory in which the links reside, usually indepen
dent of the mount point of the filesystem.
absolute links are those given as an absolute path from
the root directory as indicated by a leading slash (/).
dangling links are those for which the target of the link
does not currently exist. This commonly occurs for abso
lute links when a filesystem is mounted at other than its
customary mount point (such as when the normal root
filesystem is mounted at /mnt after booting from alterna
tive media).
messy links are links which contain unnecessary slashes or
dots in the path. These are cleaned up as well when -c is
specified.
lengthy links are links which use "../" more than neces
sary in the path (eg. /bin/vi -> ../bin/vim) These are
only detected when -s is specified, and are only cleaned
up when -c is also specified.
other_fs are those links whose target currently resides on
a different filesystem from where symlinks was run (most
useful with -r ).
OPTIONS
-c convert absolute links (within the same filesystem)
to relative links. This permits links to maintain
their validity regardless of the mount point used
for the filesystem -- a desirable setup in most
cases. This option also causes any messy links to
be cleaned up, and, if -s was also specified, then
lengthy links are also shortened. Links affected
by -c are prefixed with changed in the output.
-d causes dangling links to be removed.
same filesystem.
-s causes lengthy links to be detected.
-t is used to test for what symlinks would do if -c
were specified, but without really changing any
thing.
-v show all symbolic links. By default, relative
links are not shown unless -v is specified.
BUGS
symlinks does not recurse or change links across filesys
tems.
AUTHOR
symlinks has been written by Mark Lord <mlord@bnr.ca>, the
developer and maintainer of the IDE Performance Package
for linux.
SEE ALSO
symlink(2)
Man(1) output converted with
man2html