Get ONLY sym links to a file - linux

Question

I looked into symbolic link: find all files that link to this file and https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6184849/symbolic-link-find-all-files-that-link-to-this-file but they didn't seem to solve the problem.
if I do find -L -samefile path/to/file
the result contains hard links as well as sym links.
I've been trying to come up with a solution to fetch ONLY sym links, but can't seem to figure it out.
I've been trying to combine -samefile and -type l but that got me nowhere.
man find
says you can combine some options into an expression, but I failed to do it properly.
Any help greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Ok, I completely misread the question at first.
To find only symlinks to a certain file, I think it's still good approach to combine multiple commands.
So you know the file you want to link to, let's call it targetfile.txt. We have our directory structure like this:
$ ls -laR
.:
total 24
drwxrwxr-x 4 telorb telorb 4096 Mar 28 09:51 .
drwxrwxr-x 57 telorb telorb 4096 Mar 28 09:49 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 1 telorb telorb 21 Mar 28 09:51 another_file.txt
drwxrwxr-x 2 telorb telorb 4096 Mar 28 09:52 folder1
drwxrwxr-x 2 telorb telorb 4096 Mar 28 09:53 folder2
-rw-rw-r-- 3 telorb telorb 28 Mar 28 09:52 targetfile.txt
./folder1:
total 12
drwxrwxr-x 2 telorb telorb 4096 Mar 28 09:52 .
drwxrwxr-x 4 telorb telorb 4096 Mar 28 09:51 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 3 telorb telorb 28 Mar 28 09:52 hardlink
lrwxrwxrwx 1 telorb telorb 17 Mar 28 09:49 symlink1 -> ../targetfile.txt
./folder2:
total 12
drwxrwxr-x 2 telorb telorb 4096 Mar 28 09:57 .
drwxrwxr-x 4 telorb telorb 4096 Mar 28 09:51 ..
-rw-rw-r-- 3 telorb telorb 28 Mar 28 09:52 hardlink2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 telorb telorb 17 Mar 28 09:57 symlink2_to_targetfile -> ../targetfile.txt
lrwxrwxrwx 1 telorb telorb 19 Mar 28 09:53 symlink_to_anotherfile -> ../another_file.txt
The file in folder1/hardlink is a hardlink to targetfile.txt, folder1/symlink1 is a symbolic link we are interested, and same with folder2/symlink2_to_targetfile. There is also another symlink to another file, which we are not interested in.
The approach I would take is first use find . -type l to get symbolic links recursively from specified folder (and we still have full path information).
Then pipe that to xargs and ls -l to get the information which file the link is pointing to, and finally grep our targetfile.txt, so that we remove links that are not pointing to our desired file. The command in full:
find . -type l | xargs -I % ls -l % | grep targetfile.txt
lrwxrwxrwx 1 telorb telorb 17 Mar 28 09:57 ./folder2/symlink2_to_targetfile -> ../targetfile.txt
lrwxrwxrwx 1 telorb telorb 17 Mar 28 09:49 ./folder1/symlink1 -> ../targetfile.txt
The xargs -I % ls -l % sometimes confuses people. Basically with -I % you are telling xargs that % sign will denote all places where you want xargs place the input it receives. So it will effectively replace it to ls -l output_of_find_command