mjhjmtu

I have an "install.sh" that installs my personal scripts:

find /home/Steven -name '*.sh' -exec ln -s -t /usr/local/bin +

I would like to make an "uninstall.sh" that removes the symbolic links created
by "install.sh". I wrote this:

for z in /usr/local/bin/*
do
 if [ -h "$z" ]
 then rm "$z"
 fi
done

but it removes all symlinks, not just ones where the target is under
"/home/Steven".

If you have GNU or BSD find, this should do it:

find -lname '/home/Steven/*' -delete

You could modify your script and use grep and either readlink or realpath to extract the files in the desired subdirectory, e.g.:

for z in /usr/local/bin/*
do
 if [ -h "$z" ] && readlink -f "$z" | grep -q '^/home/Steven'
 then rm "$z"
 fi
done

The readlink -f command returns the full path to the file pointed to by the symbolic link. The grep -q '^/home/Steven' command returns true if the path begins with the substring '/home/Steven' and returns false otherwise.

A word of caution: there is some ambiguity related to symbolic links that could affect the outcome here. The readlink -f command will resolve the link recursively, so the above command would fail if the file in the /home/Steven directory were itself a symbolic link point outside of this directory. If this isn't the desired behavior then you might want to use the realpath command instead.

To cover for the case where the links may be relative and to check that their canonical path is within /home/Steven, with zsh:

rm /usr/local/bin/*(@e'[[ $REPLY:A = /home/Steven/* ]]')

Where:

• 
  @ glob qualifier that matches on symlinks:


• 
  ecode glob qualifier that matches based on the evaluation of the code (where $REPLY contains the path of the file to check)


• 
  $REPLY:A expands to the absolute path of $REPLY.