How to Avoid Many Levels of symlinks with this find?

Question

I know the thread and try to fix my find with -mindepth 15 unsuccessfully

find -L $HOME -type f -name "*.tex" \
   -exec fgrep -l "janne" /dev/null {} + | vim -R -

Unsuccessful attempt

find -L $HOME -type f -mindepth 15 -name "*.tex" \
   -exec fgrep -l "janne" /dev/null {} + | vim -R -

• find -L about it here

Its STOUT

Vim: Reading from stdin...
find: ‘/home/masi/LOREM’: Too many levels of symbolic links

Visualization of symlinks unsuccessful which gives all files while I would like to see only symlinked directories and files in the system

tree -l

Law29's proposal

# include symlinks
find "$1" -type l -name "$2*" -print0 \
    | xargs -0 grep -Hr --include "*.tex" "$2" /dev/null {} + | vim -R -

Output unsuccessful but it should not be empty

Vim: Reading from stdin...
grep: {}: No such file or directory
grep: +: No such file or directory

Characteristics of the system

masi@masi:~$ ls -ld -- "$HOME" /home/masi/LOREM 
drwxr-xr-x 52 masi masi 4096 Aug 16 16:09 /home/masi
lrwxrwxrwx  1 masi masi   17 Jun 20 00:27 /home/masi/LOREM -> /home/masi/LOREM/

masi@masi:~$ type find
find is /usr/bin/find

masi@masi:~$ find --version
find (GNU findutils) 4.7.0-git
Copyright (C) 2016 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Written by Eric B. Decker, James Youngman, and Kevin Dalley.
Features enabled: D_TYPE O_NOFOLLOW(enabled) LEAF_OPTIMISATION FTS(FTS_CWDFD) CBO(level=2) 

System: Linux Ubuntu 16.04 64 bit
For for Script at the thread: here
Find: 4.7.0
Grep: 2.25
Application of find: haetex here

Answer 1

Your problem is that you have recursive symlinks. I would consider two options:

• forget about the -L, get all the files named .tex anywhere in the tree, and then filter them (is there no other criteria than being in a directory that is pointed to by a symlink that starts with "Math"?)

• Do it in two steps, both without -L: first you search for all symlinks named "Math*" (and maybe directories too?). You take that list and search for your tex files recursively from there, like this:

  find . -type l -name "Math*" -print0 \    
      | xargs -0 grep -Hr --include "*.tex" "janne"
  

Answer 2

If the reason you're using -L is because $HOME is a symlink and you still want find to descend into it (but not in the other symlink to directories which would cause the problem you're running into), then use:

find "$HOME/" -name '*.tex' -type f -exec fgrep -l janne {} +

(/dev/null not needed with -l).

Or:

find -H "$HOME" -name '*.tex' -type f -exec fgrep -l janne {} +

That looks inside regular files only as generally, you don't want to look inside fifos, devices or directories. To also look inside symlinks to regular files (but then you'd be likely looking into the same file several times), you can change the -type f to -xtype f (assuming GNU find).

Answer 3

If you want to display all files under $HOME, including those referenced via symbolic links, that end with .tex and contain the string janne:

find -L "$HOME" -type f -name '*.tex' -exec grep -l 'janne' {} + 2>/dev/null | vim -R -

If you want to display only symbolic links found under $HOME named *.tex corresponding to files that contain the string janne:

find -L "$HOME" -xtype l -name '*.tex' -exec grep -l 'janne' {} + 2>/dev/null | vim -R -

The only way to avoid the error message "Too many levels of symbolic links" is to discard all errors, which I've done with the 2>/dev/null construct.

In both cases the find verb will not traverse across files and directories that it has already traversed - it remembers where it's already visited and prunes those parts of the filesystem tree automatically. For example,

mkdir a a/b a/b/c
cd a/b/c
ln -s ../../../a

# Here you can ls a/b/c/a/b/c/a/b/...

# But find will not continue for very long
find -L a
a
a/b
a/b/c
find: File system loop detected; ‘a/b/c/a’ is part of the same file system loop as ‘a’.