[nzlug] Any way to edit broken soft links?

[Nic Bellamy]

Raimund Eimann wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Monday 10 December 2007, Martin Bähr wrote:
>   
>> in that case you should be able to write a script:
>>
>> for each link:
>>   read link target;
>>   convert target to utf-8
>>   replace link with new one to converted target.
>>     
>
> I had a bad feeling that this might be the only way... :( 
>
> Is there at least an easy way to get the link target or is it necessary to 
> use "cut"?
>   
About the closest you can get in pure shell is to use the 'stat' 
command, eg.

$ ls -l
lrwxrwxrwx  1 owner group     26 2007-06-28 00:06 Examples -> 
/usr/share/example-content
$ stat -c '%N' Examples
`Examples' -> `/usr/share/example-content'

But then you still have to parse the output from 'stat', which isn't 
much better than parsing the output of 'ls'.

With a more powerful language, eg. Python, you can use the readlink 
syscall and be a bit more direct:

$ python
 >>> import os
 >>> os.readlink('Examples')
'/usr/share/example-content'
 >>>

Cheers,
    Nic.

-- 
Nic Bellamy <nic at bellamy.co.nz>