Easiest way to restore symbolic links turned into text files?

Question

I had folders with many symbolic links in them. Unfortunately after copying that around different filesystems, they've turned into plain text files with the link target as the contents. That is:

Before

$ ll link
... link -> /path/to/target

After

$ cat link
/path/to/target

What's the easiest way to restore this link? Perhaps a one-liner or a shell script.

Suppose I had hundreds of links like this, is there a way to restore them all, without manually running the fix on each one?

Answer 1

Use this command:

ls *txt | xargs -I R1 sh -c "cat R1 | xargs -I R2 ln -sf R2 R1"

Replace ls *txt with something that will output the list of text files that should be symbolic links. For example, find . -name "*txt" would list all *txt files in or under the current directory.

Answer 2

Try this:

ls * | while read f; do
  ln -sf "$(cat $f)" "$f" 
done

as in wingedsubmariner's answer, ls * should be replaced with something that will list exactly the files you wanted.

I find the

ls * | while read f; do
  # command executed for each file
done

construct very useful. As I know, this is the right way to handle all file names, e.g. if a file name has spaces then "$f" will still work (unlike with for f in $(ls *); do...done).

FYI: $(cmd) is the same as cmd but it can be nested unlike ``.