Determining if a soft link already exists [closed]

How can you determine if a soft link already exists? I do not know how to determine this. I am a novice to Unix/Linux

3 Answers

As a user

$ ls -l 

if the first character of the mode bits (first column) is l it's a link.

If you just want to test this from a script,

$ test -L maybealink && echo "it is a symlink"

I am assuming you want to find symlinks to a specific file but don't know in what directory they may be. In that case type

find . -lname "path/to/filename" -ls

for instance

find . -lname "develop/source/itried.cpp" -ls

to find and show (starting in your current directory) any symlinks of the file named itried.cpp that lies in the directory develop/source.

or

find . -lname "*.cpp" -ls

to find symlinks to any .cpp files under your current directory.

the . after find tells it to search from your current directory down.

If there is soft-link in your current directory

Use ll command to display the file long list

Output will be like this

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 24 Dec 2 2011 default-java -> java-1.6.0-openjdk-amd64/
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Oct 8 11:29 java-1.5.0-gcj-4.6/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 24 Dec 2 2011 java-1.6.0-openjdk -> java-1.6.0-openjdk-amd64/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 20 Jul 17 21:41 java-1.6.0-openjdk-amd64 -> java-6-openjdk-amd64/
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2387 Jul 17 21:41 .java-1.6.0-openjdk-amd64.jinfo

if there is l before rwrwrw its softlink

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 24 Dec 2 2011 default-java -> java-1.6.0-openjdk-amd64/

This is a Softlink , java-1.6.0-openjdk-amd64 had been softlinked to default-java

Softlinks will be displayed in sky blue color