mjhjmtu

I like to use relative symlinks when possible because they stay valid even when my filesystem is mounted in a non-root location, for example if I am accessing it remotely.

However, if I move a directory which contains relative symlinks, in general those links become invalid.

I am looking for a command that I can use to move a whole directory (tree), rewriting only those relative symlinks that point outside the directory so that they still point to the same files.

There is a related question on Stack Overflow, How do I move a relative symbolic link?. Also, here on Unix & Linux, find all symbolic links in a directory tree pointing outside that tree, and (referring to a much harder problem) is there some kind of symbolic links that support moving or renaming the target file?.

For example, a command called mv-rel which behaves as follows (the other commands being their GNU coreutils versions):

$ mkdir foo
$ touch bar
$ ln -sr bar foo/
$ touch foo/flob
$ ln -sr foo/flob foo/qux
$ ls -gG foo/
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 6 Dec 1 00:05 bar -> ../bar
-rw-r--r-- 1 0 Dec 1 00:24 flob
lrwxrwxrwx 1 4 Dec 1 00:24 qux -> flob

$ mkdir baz
$ mv-rel foo/ baz
$ ls -gG baz/foo/
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 6 Dec 1 00:05 bar -> ../../bar
-rw-r--r-- 1 0 Dec 1 00:24 flob
lrwxrwxrwx 1 4 Dec 1 00:24 qux -> flob

Unless I'm missing something, this also seems like it would be a useful command-line option to the 'mv' command (maybe also 'cp'). But for the purposes of this question I am looking for something that exists now, or a simple portable script that implements this functionality.

Here's a fairly destructive method: replace the relative links with absolute links:

cd foo
for f in *; do
 if [[ -h $f ]] # True if file is a symbolic link.
 then
 abs=$(readlink -f "$f") && rm "$f" && ln -s "$abs" "$f"
 fi
done