Finding all symbolic and hard links to a file on UNIX

Question

If I have a specific file in a UNIX filesystem, is there a way to use bash to find all links to that file, both symbolic and hard? If I need different commands for each, what are they?

Answer 1

Try this with GNU find:

find /start/dir -L -samefile /file/to/check -exec ls -li {} \;

Example output:

1234704 -rw-r--r-- 2 user1 user1 1134 2009-09-11 11:12 ./x1
1234704 -rw-r--r-- 2 user1 user1 1134 2009-09-11 11:12 ./x2
1234983 lrwxrwxrwx 1 user1 user1 2 2009-10-31 16:56 ./testx -> x1
2345059 lrwxrwxrwx 1 user2 user2 2 2010-01-03 16:17 ./x3 -> x1

You could use -ls instead of -exec but it will show the inode and other information of the target file instead of the individual files.

Answer 2

If you don't have GNU Find you can do this:

find / -inum "$(ls -i /file/to/check | cut -d ' ' -f 1)"

But it won't work for symbolic links.