Question

Question relates to shell-scripting in bash.

How to check with a script which files within the current directory are soft links?

In case I have used the wrong term, when I say soft links, I am referring to files created using ln -s.

The only thing I have managed to think of is to evaluate ls -la as an expression, and parse its results, but obviously this is not the best solution.

Answer 1

See 'CONDITIONAL EXPRESSIONS' in man bash - in this case you want -h:

for file in *
do
  if [ -h $file ]; then
    echo $file
  fi
done

Answer 2

You might not really need a script. To show any symbolic links in just the current folder, without recursing into any child folder:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type l -print

Or, to get some more info:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type l -print0 | xargs -0 ls -ld

To tell if a file is a symbolic link, one can use readlink, which will output nothing if it's not a symbolic link. The following example is not quite useful, but shows how readlink ignores normal files and folders:

find . -maxdepth 1 -print0 | xargs -0 readlink