Convert symbolic links into corresponding target files

Question

I have several symlinks to other files in a directory. I want to convert these links into independent files.

Is there a command that does this?

Answer 1

cp --remove-destination "$(readlink <symlink>)" <symlink>

Answer 2

The first way that comes to my mind would be to copy all of the links to new files then delete all of the links.

cp <link> <link>.new
rm <link>

Hopefully the files have some sort of common naming structure so you can use wildcarding and only run the commands once otherwise you might want to write a simple shell script

Answer 3

While Ignacio's is a good reply, I wanted to automate the process for every file that is a symlink in the current directory and subdirectories.

This does the trick:

find . -type l -exec cp \"{}\" \"{}.tmp$$\" \; -exec mv \"{}.tmp$$\" \"{}\" \;

Hope this helps!