Find All Symbolic Links in Linux

Looking for all the soft links on your Linux system? Here are a couple of methods to find symbolic links.

Jan 31, 2023 - 20:00

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How do you find a soft link?

You can use the ls command. Some distributions show the links in a different color. The long listing is always reliable because it shows links with l.

lrwxrwxrwx 1 abhishek abhishek 14 Jan 31 18:07 my_link -> redirects.yaml

You can also use the tree command:

This is okay if you have a couple of links in the current directory. But what if you want to see the links in a nested directory structure or the entire system?

In this tutorial, I will be showing you two ways to accomplish this mission:

Using the find command
Using the symlinks utility

So let's start with the first one.

Use find command to look for symbolic links

To find the symbolic links using the find command, you can use the following command syntax:

find Target_directory -type l

For example, here, I searched for available symbolic links inside the Links directory:

find Links/ -type l

But by default, the find command will initiate the recursive search and if you want to limit the search to a certain depth, you will have to use the -maxdepth flag.

So let's say I want to restrict the search to level 1 for the Links directory, I will be using the following:

find Links/ -maxdepth 1 -type l

And if you want detailed output including the file permissions, user groups, etc. then you will have to pair the find command with -ls flag:

find Target_directory -type l -ls

If you want a system-wide search, you can use / in the command.

Use the symlinks utility to find all symbolic links

This tool is what I used while pursuing my internship in networking.

But it does not come pre-installed though. You can install it using your distribution's package manager. For Ubuntu/Debian, use:

sudo apt install symlinks

Once you are done with the installation, use the given command structure to look for available symbolic links:

symlinks -v target_directory

Here, the -v option gives verbose output.

But by default, the symlinks utility won't look into subdirectories. Enable recursive search with the -r option:

symlinks -vr target_directory

The output has specific terms. Let me explain them.

relative indicates that links are relative to the current working directory in which the link resides.
other_fs means the link is indicating a different filesystem. In my case, it is indicated to the external drive.