How to list all symbolic links in a directory

Question

I have a symbolic link in my /var/www/ directory that links to WordPress. When I run the command ls -la from the /var/www/ directory the link to WordPress doesn't show up. Is there a way to list all of the symbolic links that are in a directory?

score 475 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:24

475

Parsing ls is a Bad Idea®, prefer a simple find in that case:

find . -type l -ls

To only process the current directory:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type l -ls

^{Credits: How do I make the shell to recognize the file names returned by a `ls -A` command, and these names contain spaces?}

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:24

Community

1

answered Sep 09 '14 at 18:21

Sylvain Pineau

62,169

find: Unknown argument to -type: 1 – ahnbizcad May 28 '15 at 16:39
18

@ahnbizcad: It's not 1 (one) but l (link) – Sylvain Pineau May 28 '15 at 17:51
3

Great answer! I adjusted mine to not descend down directory path like this: find /<your_directory> -maxdepth 1 -type l -ls 2>/dev/null
Thank you!
– bgs Feb 04 '16 at 18:47
3

For only the current directory (i.e. not recursive) add -maxdepth 1. – Joshua Pinter Apr 08 '16 at 14:32
| awk -F' ' '{ print $11 }' | sort -n provides a tidy listing of the symlinks ready to export to a file. – solr Jun 16 '19 at 01:54
1

@cig0 u do not need to use awk, u probably want just this: find . -maxdepth 1 -type l | sort -n – sobi3ch Jun 28 '19 at 15:43
1

What does the -ls do at the end of the find commands? – Gabriel Staples Feb 13 '20 at 07:22
2

@GabrielStaples from man find: -ls True; list current file in ls -dils format on standard output. Useful to see ./os-release -> ../usr/lib/os-release in /etc rather than just ./os-release – Sylvain Pineau Feb 13 '20 at 09:11
What if I want to check if a specific path is a symlink ? – android developer Sep 25 '23 at 12:51

score 130 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 20 '16 at 09:31

130

You can use grep with ls command to list all the symbolic links present in the current directory.

This will list all the links present in the current directory.

ls -la /var/www/ | grep "\->"

edited Jun 20 '16 at 09:31

muru

197,895
55
485
740

answered Sep 09 '14 at 18:02

g_p

18,504

12

It will return false positive if you have a file containing "->". Try a simple touch "foo->" – Sylvain Pineau Sep 09 '14 at 18:32
7

why not greping with ^l? – Eliran Malka Jan 18 '17 at 12:13
1

Nice! → .bash_alias: alias listlinks='ls -l --color | grep "\->"' 8-) – Frank N Apr 11 '18 at 03:08
Pass -R to ls to get recursive list. – Itachi Apr 27 '18 at 07:10
1

Please, do not use ls for scripting. Also mentioned in other answers. More: http://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs – Artfaith Mar 08 '21 at 17:36

score 12 · Answer 3 · edited Oct 08 '15 at 14:59

12

grep is your friend:

ls -lhaF | grep ^l   # list links
ls -lhaF | grep ^d   # list directories
ls -lhaF | grep ^-   # list files

This will list lines starting with "l" which represent Links in the perms column in place of l use d for directories and - for files

edited Oct 08 '15 at 14:59

Fabby

34,259

answered Oct 08 '15 at 10:22

Kalibur

121

1

Just don't do anything with this method programatically since malicious filenames can end up injecting shell code. To be safe, one should use the find command with -exec, and if piping to xargs, use the null-character separator output flag of find combined with the null-character separator input flag of xargs. – ErikE Dec 19 '19 at 15:24

score 9 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 09 '14 at 18:24

9

POSIXly:

find ! -name . -prune -type l

answered Sep 09 '14 at 18:24

cuonglm

2,455

1

Can you explain the ! in this context? – Mtl Dev Jan 14 '20 at 15:42
@MtlDev ! negates the condition matching, here ! -name . means matching everything except current directory. – cuonglm Jan 15 '20 at 04:49

score 4 · Answer 5 · edited Sep 12 '14 at 06:16

4

To view the symbolic links in a directory:

Open a terminal and move to that directory.
Type the command:
```
ls -la
```
This shall long list all the files in the directory even if they are hidden.
The files that start with l are your symbolic link files.

edited Sep 12 '14 at 06:16

Eliah Kagan

117,780

answered Sep 10 '14 at 05:43

sandeep srivastav vaddiparthy

183

1

-1: KasiyA's answer already covers this. – muru Sep 10 '14 at 05:45
this also lists non-syminks. Far better solutions that answer the Q already posted. – RichieHH Oct 14 '20 at 05:09

score 3 · Answer 6 · edited Jan 19 '19 at 20:30

This returns all symbolically linked items (both dirs & fns) in a directory:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type l -print | cut -c3- | grep -v "\#"

However, in order to distinguish between actual symbolically linked item types:

ls -lhaF | grep ^l | grep -v "\#" | cut -c42- | grep -v "/" | cut -d' ' -f1

Returns symbolically linked filename items only. And,

ls -lhaF | grep ^l | grep -v "\#" | cut -c42- | grep "/" | cut -d' ' -f1

Returns symbolically linked dirname items only.

score 2 · Answer 7 · answered Dec 02 '21 at 17:33

2

using zsh

ls -l *(@)
lrwxrwxrwx 1 david david 15 Nov 18 22:35 gvimrc -> /etc/vim/gvimrc
lrwxrwxrwx 1 david david 13 Nov 18 22:19 mydomains.php -> mydomains.php

answered Dec 02 '21 at 17:33

zzapper

151
4

score 0 · Answer 8 · answered Jan 28 '21 at 22:06

0

Kindly find below one liner bash script command to find all broken symbolic links recursively in any linux based OS

b=$(find / -type l); for i in $(echo $b); do file $i ; done |grep -i broken 2> /dev/null

answered Jan 28 '21 at 22:06

Mr. Linux

189

saptarshi nag · Answer 9 · 2014-09-09T18:42:43.913

0

Type ls -lai,it will list all the files and subdirectories with corresponding inode numbers.You know files with same inode number are the links(hard or soft) and this solution also works for the symbolic links.

edited Sep 09 '14 at 18:42

answered Sep 09 '14 at 18:18

saptarshi nag

451

1

ls -lai does not show the same inode number for a file and its symbolic links. Unlike hard links, symbolic links have their own separate inode entries. This is what it looks like. – Eliah Kagan Sep 12 '14 at 06:19

score 0 · Answer 10 · answered Jan 09 '17 at 11:15

Can be done with python as well:

$ python -c "import os,sys; print '\n'.join([os.path.join(sys.argv[1],i) for i in os.listdir(sys.argv[1]) if os.path.islink(os.path.join(sys.argv[1],i))])" /path/to/dir

Sample run:

$ python -c "import os,sys; print '\n'.join([os.path.join(sys.argv[1],i) for i in os.listdir(sys.argv[1]) if os.path.islink(os.path.join(sys.argv[1],i))])" /etc
/etc/vtrgb
/etc/printcap
/etc/resolv.conf
/etc/os-release
/etc/mtab
/etc/localtime

This can be extended to be recursive via os.walk function, but it's sufficient to use simple list generation for listing links in a single directory as I showed above.

Way over complicating when basic shell commands can already do this. — RichieHH, Oct 14 '20 at 05:10

How to list all symbolic links in a directory

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