Comments on: Recursively deleting symbolic link and what it points to http://www.alexonlinux.com/recursively-deleting-symbolic-link-and-what-it-points-to Sun, 05 Feb 2012 21:17:46 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= By: Alexander Sandler http://www.alexonlinux.com/recursively-deleting-symbolic-link-and-what-it-points-to/comment-page-1#comment-28439 Alexander Sandler Sun, 05 Feb 2012 21:13:15 +0000 http://www.alexonlinux.com/?p=1703#comment-28439 Wow. I am speechless.<div class="comment-remix-meta"><a href="#" class="replyto" onclick="replyto('28439','Alexander Sandler'); return false;">Reply</a> - <a href="#" class="quote" onclick="quote('28439','Alexander Sandler','Wow. I am speechless.'); return false;">Quote</a></div> Wow. I am speechless.
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]]> By: Ralph Corderoy http://www.alexonlinux.com/recursively-deleting-symbolic-link-and-what-it-points-to/comment-page-1#comment-27849 Ralph Corderoy Sun, 04 Dec 2011 11:11:07 +0000 http://www.alexonlinux.com/?p=1703#comment-27849 An interesting problem. Assuming I wasn’t writing a C program to start with I’d have initially tackled it at the shell.

seq 10 98 | while read f; do ln -s $((f+1)) $f; done; >99
f=10; while [[ -L $f || -e $f ]]; do n=$(readlink “$f”); rm “$f”; f=”$n”; done

Originally I had “while [[ $f ]]” but this causes rm to attempt to remove a non-existent file if a symlink is broken. Adding -e alone doesn’t work because [[ -e 10 ]] is false as bash gives up after following a few of the symlinks so we need to continue whilst it’s either a symlink or it really does exist.

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