Symlinks

symbolic link maintenance utility.

symlinks [ -cdorstv ] dirlist

symlinks is a useful utility for maintainers of FTP sites, CDROMs, and Linux software distributions. It scans directories 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 independent 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 absolute 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 alternative 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 necessary 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 ).

symlinks does not recurse or change links across filesystems.