Removing file and its sym links

Question

If I create a file and symlink to it e.g

touch "example"
ln -s "example" "link_example"

and use

rm example

the symlink is still there. How can I delete file and all symlinks that points to that file with it?

Answer 1

There's no link from a file to symlinks that point to it, so there's no direct way of considering example and finding link_example which links to it. So deleting symlinks pointing to a file along with the file involves finding all the symlinks first.

You don't specify what system you're using, but if you have GNU find, you can delete a file and its links with

find -L / -samefile example -delete

You might want to run

find -L / -samefile example

first to list what will be deleted.

This instructs find to follow symlinks (-L), start from /, and report any file which resolves to the same inode as example — so this will match hard and soft links to example as well as example itself.

Alternatively, using only POSIX find, you can delete example and then look for broken symlinks:

rm example
find -L / -type l

If you're sure all the results should be deleted:

find -L / -type l -exec rm {} +

will delete all the broken symlinks (in directories you can write to).