Managing Broken Symlinks

Jerod — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:02:32 +0000

I just added two new functions to my bashrc which make it super-simple to find & remove broken symbolic links on your system.

They’re simple wrappers around the ever-useful “find” utility:

function find_broken_symlinks() { find -x -L "${1-.}" -type l; }
function rm_broken_symlinks() { find -x -L "${1-.}" -type l -exec rm {} +; }

You can call the functions with a specific path:

jerod@mbp:~$ find_broken_symlinks /usr/local/bin

Or you can call them sans argument to search your current working directory:

jerod@mbp:~$ find_broken_symlinks

Enjoy!

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