NAME

       symlinks - symbolic link maintenance utility

SYNOPSIS

       symlinks [ -cdorstv ] dirlist

DESCRIPTION

       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 ).

OPTIONS

       -c     convert  absolute  links  (within  the  same filesystem) to relative links.  This permits links to
              maintain their validity regardless of the mount point used for the filesystem -- a desirable setup
              in most cases.  This option also causes any messy links to be cleaned up,  and,  if  -s  was  also
              specified,  then lengthy links are also shortened.  Links affected by -c are prefixed with changed
              in the output.

       -d     causes dangling links to be removed.

       -o     fix  links  on  other  filesystems  encountered  while  recursing.   Normally,  other  filesystems
              encountered are not modified by symlinks.

       -r     recursively operate on subdirectories within the same filesystem.

       -s     causes lengthy links to be detected.

       -t     is  used  to  test  for  what  symlinks would do if -c were specified, but without really changing
              anything.

       -v     show all symbolic links.  By default, relative links are not shown unless -v is specified.

BUGS

       symlinks does not recurse or change links across filesystems.

AUTHOR

       symlinks has been written by Mark Lord <mlord@pobox.com>, the original developer and  maintainer  of  the
       IDE  Performance  Package  for  linux,  the  Linux IDE Driver subsystem, hdparm, and a current day libata
       hacker.

SEE ALSO

       symlink(2)

Version 1.4                                       October 2008                                       SYMLINKS(1)