Convert symbolic links into corresponding target files

Question

I have several symlinks to other files in a directory. I want to convert these links into independent files.

Is there a command that does this?

Answer 1

cp --remove-destination "$(readlink <symlink>)" <symlink>

Answer 2

While Ignacio's is a good reply, I wanted to automate the process for every file that is a symlink in the current directory and subdirectories.

This does the trick:

find . -type l -exec cp \"{}\" \"{}.tmp$$\" \; -exec mv \"{}.tmp$$\" \"{}\" \;

Hope this helps!

Answer 3

The first way that comes to my mind would be to copy all of the links to new files then delete all of the links.

cp <link> <link>.new
rm <link>

Hopefully the files have some sort of common naming structure so you can use wildcarding and only run the commands once otherwise you might want to write a simple shell script

Answer 4

FYI: Mac OS X does not support the --remove-destination flag so I wrote a simple script to put in your /usr/bin directory:

FILE=$1
TEMP=$1".tmp"

mv $FILE $TEMP

if [ -e $TEMP ]
then
    cp "$(readlink $TEMP)" $FILE

    if [ -f $FILE ]
    then
        rm $TEMP
    else
        echo "unln failed."
    fi
fi

This one let's you use wildcards:

for FILE in "$@"
do
    TEMP=$FILE".tmp"

    if [ -h $FILE ]
    then
        mv $FILE $TEMP

        if [ -e $TEMP ]
        then
            cp "$(readlink $TEMP)" $FILE

            if [ -f $FILE ]
            then
                rm $TEMP
            else
                echo "unln failed for link: $FILE"
            fi
        fi
    fi
done