[lug] Tools to navigate Unix links backwards?

[Jeffrey Haemer]

Does "tree(1)" help you?

On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 3:16 PM, Vince Dean <vincedean at frii.com> wrote:

> On 7/23/2010 9:52 AM, Jeffrey Haemer wrote:
>
> > Can you provide some use cases?   Examples of what
> > you'd like to do if you had the tool of your dreams?
>
> Good question. I was actually casting about for ways to understand or
> visualize the structure, though I framed it as a specific question.
>
> The problem is that links are easy to create, but hard to understand
> after the fact. I understand that the file name is not actually a
> property of the file, but of the directory entry which points to it, and
> that the inode number is the unique identifier for the file.
>
> I might have asked:
>
>    Yikes -- I've got a thicket of hard and symbolic links and I'm
>    having a hard time understanding the intent.  Any suggestions?
>
> For example, consider the case where someone made a new version
> of a directory tree by creating symbolic links in place of files:
>
>   cp -rs /foo/v1 /foo/v2
>
> and then broke the links for those files in v2 which need to
> be different from v1, replacing the links with actual
> files.  This may be a be convenient when creating the new version but is
> a maintenance trap for someone else who modifies a file in v2 without
> realizing that he is simultaneously modifying the file in v1.
>
> Use cases might be:
>
>    I am finding what appears to be the same file in several different
>    places. When I look at the inode numbers, I see that they are
>    in fact the same file.  How many other links point to the same file?
>    Which other files have multiple paths?  What is the intent?
>
>    I am seeing lots of links in this part of the system.
>    Maybe some sort of listing will help me see the pattern.
>
> I'll probably be poking around with whatever tools I have, writing
> scripts that run find and ls -il, and drawing lots of pictures, until I
> get a better idea what the structure is.  We do have people who are
> familiar with the system, so I am not starting from scratch.
>
> Vince
>
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-- 
Jeffrey Haemer <jeffrey.haemer at gmail.com>
720-837-8908 [cell], http://seejeffrun.blogspot.com [blog],
http://www.youtube.com/user/goyishekop [vlog]
פרייהייט? דאס איז יאַנג דינען וואָרט.
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