find / -lname '/path/you/are/looking/for/*'
Note that the -lname option is a GNU find extension and may not work with other find implementations.
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
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I think it's easier the other way round, find all symlinks and grep the directory you want to move from results.
Something like 'find /home/user -type -l -exec ls -l {} ; | grep yourdirectory' and work from there. I don't think there's an easy way to list which symlinks point to any actual file.
~~You want readlink -f rather than ls -l.~~ ++OK, actually not exactly. readlink won’t print path to the symlink so it’s not as straightforward.++
Also, you want + in find ... -exec ... + rather than ;.
At this point I feel committed to making readlink work. ;) Here’s the script you want:
#!/bin/sh
want=$1
shift
readlink -f -- "$@" | while read got; do
if [ "$got" = "$want" ]; then
echo "$1"
fi
shift
done
and execute it as:
find ~ -type l -exec /bin/sh /path/to/the/script /path/to/target/dir {} +
because zsh I swapped out ~ -> $HOME. In addition to some permission denied that you always get finding over the home dir, I get these weird hits:
find "$HOME" -type l -exec /bin/sh /path/to/the/script "/path/to/target/dir" {} +
/home/user/.konan/dependencies/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu-gcc-8.3.0-glibc-2.19-kernel-4.9-2/x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/lib64/libatomic.so
/home/user/.mozilla/firefox/xxx000xx.someprofile/chrome/dir/file.css
lib atomic is something I've heard of vaguely but certainly not anything I use. I couldn't identify any way this file was doing anything outside the ~/.konan dir.
the CSS files there were a few different ones in a couple different Firefox profiles. it's the user customization. But I don't think it should have anything to do with the directory I was asking for.
If I give it a bit more of a hint, telling to look in ~/.config specifically, now I get some (but not all) the links I expect.
find "$HOME/.config" -type l -exec /bin/sh /path/to/the/script "/path/to/target/dir" {} +
/home/user/.config/dir02
/home/user/.config/dir01/subdir/file
/home/user/.config/dir01/subdir2/file2
And suggesting it searches in the .konan dir where it found lib atomimc, it now doesn't find anything.
find "$HOME/.konan" -type l -exec /bin/sh /path/to/the/script "/path/to/target/dir" {} +
Could be all kinds of things getting the way. Different versions of relevant tools, filesystems/setups, permissions...
You could pass $1 and $got through $(realpath -P -- ...) to make sure all the path are in canonical form. Though now that I’m thinking about it, stat is probably a better option anyway:
want=/path/to/target/dir
pattern=$(stat -c^%d:%i: -- "$want")
find "$HOME" -type l -exec stat -Lc%d:%i:%n {} + | grep "$pattern"
If you just rename the dir, and then find all broken symlinks in your system?
find . -xtype l
You could just move the dir and leave a symlink in its place. It doesn't solve the actual problem, but it's much easier and will keep everything working just fine.