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I can't seem to find a way to do this, so maybe it's not actually possible, but I was wondering if there was a way to list all files that link to a file.

For example.

touch a
ln a b
ln a c

I want to find out what files link to a (not symlinks, mind you), assuming that this is more complicated (they are spread around to different directories).

I kind of understand about the filesystem storing links in one area and data in another, so I understand it probably takes more work to find a link from a file location than the other way around.

If I missed another question asking the same thing, let me know.

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Try find / -samefile /file/to/compare.

There were a similar question: Finding all symbolic and hard links to a file on UNIX

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Ah, ok. I guess I just wasn't searching for the correct thing. Thanks! – bradlis7 Jan 21 '10 at 22:50
This only works with GNU Find. – Ollie Saunders Jun 7 '10 at 13:00
I found no convenient options to do this in BSD Find, but you could try getting an inode number with ls -i and then doing find /mountpoint -x -inum $INODE. Inode represents contents of the file and not the filename. – whitequark Jun 7 '10 at 14:37
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