sjmulder / linkmove

Link-move files: move a file leaving a link in the old location

linkmove

linkmove [-v] source* ... *target

Move files, leaving behind symlinks.

Description

Moves each source to target, follwing mv(1) semantics, leaving behind symlinks at the source locations pointing to the new locations.

The moves are attempted using rename(2). If that fails, the files or di‐ rectories are recursively copied and then deleted, making a best-effort attempt to preserve metadata.

If -v is given, touched paths in target are output to standard error.

Rationale

linkmove was created to move files in a website without breaking links.

Manually invoking mv(1) and ln(1) in sequence works well for smaller num‐ ber of items but it's tricky for a generic script to determine the proper link target since the mv(1) target argument may refer to either the full path or a parent directy.

Exit status

Zero on success, non-zero if an error occured.

Examples

Rename and symlink old.txt to new.txt and verify the results:

$ linkmove old.txt new.txt

$ file -h old.txt new.txt
old.txt: symbolic link to new.txt
new.txt: ASCII text

Link-move multipe items with verbose output:

$ linkmove foo bar /nfs
/nfs/foo
/nfs/foo/a
/nfs/foo/b
/nfs/bar

Here, the move was across filesystem boundaries so the foo directory was copied recursively.

See also

ln(1), mv(1)

Authors

Sijmen J. Mulder ⟨[e-mail]⟩

Bugs

Trailing slashes in source paths cause an error.

Exits on any error, rather than continuing with the next file.