How to find all files which are basically soft or hard links of other directories or files on linux?

Question

How could I get the list of all linked files on my system or from a certain directory. I used to create links but they became unmanageable with time. I want the list of all such links from a directory. Can anyone help?

Answer 1

Finding symlinks is easy:

% find . -type l

Finding hard links is tricky, because if a subdirectory of the directory in question also has subdirectories then those increase the hard link count. That's how subdirectories are linked to their parents in UNIX (it's the .. entry in each subdirectory).

If you only want to find linked files (and not directories), this will work:

% find . -type f \! -links 1

This works because a file that does have hard links will have a link count > 1, and unlinked file has a link count == 1, hence this command looks for all files whose link count <> 1

Alternatively, on newer versions of find you could use:

% find . -type f -links +1

This works for the same reason as above; however, newer versions of find can take +n or -n instead of just a number. This is equivalent to testing for greater than n or less than n, respectively.