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Techy: Find All Symlinks (Symbolic Links) on a Linux System

I’ve just needed to try and find all symbolic links (symlinks) on a RedHat Enterprise Linux server so I can replicate the setup of the server (for some reason, the config files and other settings are in “non-standard” places and are symlinked from the original location).

To find all the sym links, just run this simple Linux command line option:
find / -type l -exec ls -l {} \;

(and, if you would prefer all the symlinks to be stored in a file – as there will be a very large number of them – use the command find / -type l -exec ls -l {} \; > /home/admin/symlinks.txt).

I hope this helps somebody else who has to work with undocumented strangely configured Linux machines.

2 Comments

  1. Raymond Day Raymond Day

    Looks like a nice command to find symlinks. But I was looking for one that could find all symlinks that loop back on there self. Like multimedia/multimedia/multimedia/multimedia that will just go on and on. So is there some way to have this command just find any link that goes over and over set to a number like 10?

    -Raymond Day

  2. […] I looked on line to see if any command can find looped folders. I found one that can find links and … I ran the command and it took a long time and still going. I downloaded and installed TextPad for the Dell. Had to stop the command else TextPad would keep poping up it changed. So I stopped it. But it looked like it was not looping. I looked at things it found in the text file with WinSCP. But I could not find any that linked over and over. I left a commant on that symlinks page. I hope they say how. […]

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