Instead of deleting an existing symlink and then re-creating it pointing at the new location, it is possible to perform the same action with this one command. Interesting discussion on whether this is possible to do atomically here: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=526119

This command finds and prints all the symbolic and hard links to a file. Note that the file argument itself be a link and it will find the original file as well. You can also do this with the inode number for a file or directory by first using stat or ls or some other tool to get the number like so: stat -Lc %i file or ls -Hid file And then using: find -L / -inum INODE_NUMBER -exec ls -ld {} +

The symlinks command can show status of all symbolic links, including which links are dangling, which symlinks point to files on other file systems, which symlinks use ../ more than necessary, which symlinks are messy (e.g. having too many slashes or dots), etc. Other useful things it can do include removing all dangling links (-d) and converting absolute links to relative links (-c). The path given must be an absolute path (which is why I used $(pwd) in the example command).

This is much safer than using -L, because it will not follow links that point to places outside the target directory subtree (CWD, in this case). See here for explanation: http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/38691/9382

recursively deletes all broken symlinks using zsh globbing syntax.

To understand why this is the equivalent of "find -L /path/to/search -type l, see http://ynform.org/w/Pub/FindBrokenSymbolicLinks or look at http://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/manual/html_mono/find.html

After you run this script, you can check status for broken symlink with this command: find -L . -type l

This will list all symlinks that are directories under the current directory. This will help you distinguish them from regular files.

I use this with alias: alias lsl="ls -1F | grep @ | sed 's/@//' | column"

I use this with alias: alias lsl="ls -1F | grep @$ | sed 's/@//' | column" Limitation: This will also list files that happen to have an @ at the end of the filename.

Replace '/tmp/file 1.txt' '/tmp/file 2.jpg' with "$NAUTILUS_SCRIPT_SELECTED_FILE_PATHS" for Nautilus script Or with %F for Thunar action If you linking the symlinks itself, but want to link to source files instead of symlinks, use "`readlink -m "$i"`" instead of "$i" like this: for i in '/tmp/file 1.txt' '/tmp/file 2.jpg'; do ln -s "`readlink -m "$i"`" "$i LINK"; done ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Show Sample Output