Change in behavior to stat(1)

[Ronald Klop]

On Mon, 28 Feb 2011 23:39:10 +0100, jhell <jhell at dataix.net> wrote:

>
> On Mon, 28 Feb 2011 12:15, stephen@ wrote:
>> I had a little script that would remove broken links.  I used to do it  
>> like this:
>>
>> if ! stat -L $link > /dev/null; then rm $link; fi
>>
>> But recently (some time in February according to the CVS records) stat  
>> was changed so that stat -L would use lstat(2) if the link is broken.
>>
>> So I had to change it to
>>
>> if stat -L $link | awk '{print $3}' | grep l > /dev/null;
>> then rm $link; fi
>>
>> but it is a lot less elegant.
>>
>> What is the proper accepted way to remove broken links?
>>
>> Stephen
>>
>
> You might find sysutils/symlinks interesting. I have been using it a  
> long time and have not had to consider adjusting much in the way of  
> shell scripting to remove dirty links.
>
>   -c == change absolute/messy links to relative
>   -d == delete dangling links
>   -o == warn about links across file systems
>   -r == recurse into subdirs
>   -s == shorten lengthy links
>   -t == show what would be done by -c
>   -v == verbose (show all symlinks)
>
>
> Quite interesting though how such a little tweak has caused a massive  
> expansion of your command line and required utils.
>
>
> Good luck,
>

Find has some voodoo for handling links also.

Ronald.