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I can use

find /search/location -type l

to list all symbolic links inside /search/location.

How do I limit the output of find to symbolic links that refer to a valid directory, and exclude both, broken symbolic links and links to files?

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3 Answers 3

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8

With GNU find (the implementation on non-embedded Linux and Cygwin):

find /search/location -type l -xtype d

With find implementations that lack the -xtype primary, you can use two invocations of find, one to filter symbolic links and one to filter the ones that point to directories:

find /search/location -type l -exec sh -c 'find -L "$@" -type d -print' _ {} +

or you can call the test program:

find /search/location -type l -exec test {} \; -print

Alternatively, if you have zsh, it's just a matter of two glob qualifiers (@ = is a symbolic link, - = the following qualifiers act on the link target, / = is a directory):

print -lr /search/location/**/*(@-/)
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  • find . -type l -exec sh -c 'find "$@" -L -type d -print' _ {} + yielded find: unknown predicate `-L' for me. moving the -L in the second find invocation before the "$@" made this work. Commented Aug 22, 2021 at 16:29
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Try:

find /search/location -type l -exec test -e {} \; -print

From man test:

 -e FILE FILE exists

You might also benefit from this U&L answer to How can I find broken symlinks; be sure to read the comments too.

Edit: test -d to check if "FILE exists and is a directory"

find /search/location -type l -exec test -d {} \; -print
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0

Here you go:

for i in $(find /search/location -type l); do test -d $(readlink $i) && echo $i done
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