FIND LINUX BROKEN SYMLINKS

Find broken symbolic links

A while ago, I was willing to contribute with a GitHub project, but I found some issues with broken links. This situation led me to a question: how can I recursively find all broken links within a directory?

The command below will print the path to any broken symbolic links found in the specified folder and its subfolders.

find /path/to/folder -type l ! -exec test -e {} \; -print

Let’s explain each part of the command does:

• find /path/to/folder: Search recursively starting from the specified folder.
• -type l: Only look for symbolic links.
• ! -exec test -e {} \;: Use the test command to check if each symbolic link exists. The {} is a placeholder for the path to the symbolic link. The -e option to test checks if the file exists. The ! negates the result of the test, so the command will succeed if the file does not exist (i.e., if the symbolic link is broken).
• -print: Print the path to any broken symbolic links found.

Conclusion

With the list of broken symbolic links, to fix the issue, it is just a matter of recreating the links pointing to the right locations.