Finding Hard Or Soft Symlinks

When you have a symlink, it’s trivial to use ls or realink to resolve what files it points to. When you have a hardlink, you don’t even need resolution.

What happens if you have a canonical source file and you’re trying to find who references it? Turns out it’s not so simple. You have to use find to scour the filesystem and do file node comparison.

find -L /search-dir/ -samefile /dir/target-file

The use case that I encountered was with brew and finding out if fish shell completions were installed. The brew formulae installs files in the brew location and uses symlinks to install it onto the system. I was debugging why I was missing docker-compose completions and trying to diagnose if it was not part of installation steps.