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I need help in writing a script to create symbolic links. Here is a script that I have been running on background.

#!/bin/bash
SOURCE="/home/$USER/www"
DEST="/var/www"
while true; do
    find $SOURCE -maxdepth 1 -type d -not -name "old.**" -exec ln -s -- {} "$DEST"/{} \;
    find $DEST -maxdepth 1 -type l -exec test ! -e {} \; -delete
sleep 30
done

Now I would like this script to perform couple more tasks.

  • Ignore already linked folders and folders with 'old.' prefix.
  • Remove symbolic-link from $DEST if the main folder is not available in $SOURCE.

Please help me to add those functionality on this script. Thanks.

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  • What did your attempts look like? Possibly those will just need minor modifications to achieve what you want.
    – ErikE
    Dec 25, 2013 at 16:12
  • My attempt is to compare 'find $DEST -maxdepth 1 -type l' with 'find $SOURCE -maxdepth 1 -type d -not -name "old.*"' and check if there are new folders in $SOURCE or links without main folders. Then create/remove links. The thing is I am not able to put it together here.
    – Himalay
    Dec 25, 2013 at 19:00
  • @ErikE I wonder if you could help me with this?
    – Himalay
    Dec 27, 2013 at 11:43
  • I believe this should not be too difficult and fun at the same time, however I'm holiday-stuck on iThings mostly. I would like to test before posting, so I'll likely post an answer eventually if it hasn't been solved :-)
    – ErikE
    Dec 27, 2013 at 12:12
  • Now it almost works as I wanted but only thing is it tries to create links of all of those folders other than old.* in $SOURCE. :|
    – Himalay
    Dec 28, 2013 at 10:58

1 Answer 1

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I know this might be more cumbersome than you expected, but I would rewrite the -exec ... part as a separate script that gets one input parameter (the directory name to symlink to), and then checks if the symlink already exists (e.g. if [ -h "$DEST/$1" ] ...) and, if necessary, whether it resolves to a correct location (e.g. if [ $(readlink $DEST/$1) == $SOURCE/$1 ] .... If both conditions are true, we skip the file, otherwise the symlink is (re)created.

Then you call this script in the exec clase like this: find $SOURCE -maxdepth 1 -type f -not -name "old.**" -exec make-symlink.sh {} \;

A couple of further points:

  • The file names that find will substitute in place of {} will include $SOURCE: e.g. in your case the final exec command will look like this: ln -s -- /home/user/www/public /var/www/home/user/www/public. Solve this problem by using basename.

  • on some systems (OS X) the $SRC directory itself will be included in the list of directories find finds. This is probably not what you want. Solve this problem by removing first line of find output or by adding -not -name $(basename $SOURCE) clause.

Hope this helps.

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