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bash Cookbook
book

bash Cookbook

by Carl Albing, JP Vossen, Cameron Newham
May 2007
Beginner
628 pages
15h 46m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from bash Cookbook

Finding Files Across Symbolic Links

Problem

You issued a find command to find your .mp3 files but it didn’t find all of them—it missed all those that were part of your filesystem but were mounted via a symbolic link. Is find unable to cross that kind of boundary?

Solution

Use the -follow predicate. The example we used before becomes:

$ find . -follow -name '*.mp3' -print0 | xargs -i -0 mv '{}' ~/songs

Discussion

Sometimes you don’t want find to cross over onto other filesystems, which is where symbolic links originated. So the default for find is not to follow a symbolic link. If you do want it to do so, then use the -follow option as the first option in the list on your find command.

See Also

  • man find

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596526784Errata Page