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symlink

How to find if a folder is being pointed as a symlink by another folder in EFS?

How to find if a folder is being pointed as a symlink by another folder? Eg. say A --> B, C --> D and No one is pointing to another folder say "E".

How do I know its folder E where no one is pointing.

NOTE: All folders are in AWS EFS and all links are soft links.

Solution

  • There is no way to tell this. Soft links (symlinks) are not reference counted and to try to figure out whether or not E is being referenced is not possible with certainty.

    If you are maintaining a formal process to create all the symlinks and are not worried about any symlinks that are created outside of your formal process, then you could possibly maintain a refcount in some meta data associated with targets. In your example they would B and D (and E) only remove the ones that have a reference count of 0.

    Now you'd run into the issue of A --> B --> C and then if B gets unlinked you'd have to dec the refcount. There are many other issues with trying to do this at a symlink level.