Recursively re-link all multi-hop symlinks to directly link to final destination instead

Question

How would one go about recursively removing middleman links? For example:
somelink -> someintermediarylink -> actualfile.txt

would become
somelink -> actualfile.txt

for all files in a directory and its subdirectories (i.e. recursively)
Ideas?

Stéphane Chazelas · Answer

With GNU tools:
find . -type l ! -xtype l -exec sh -c '
  for link do
    target=$(readlink -e -- "$link") &&
      ln -svTf -r -- "$target" "$link"
  done' sh {} +

Would change all non-broken symlinks to be relative and without symlink components in their target.
Remove the -r if you'd rather have absolute symlinks.
That assumes none of the canonical absolute names of the files those symlinks point to end in newline characters (the usual limitation of command substitution that strips all trailing newline characters).

fivedogit · Answer

#!/bin/bash
# Usage: ./relinkToFinalDestination directory_path
directory=$1
find -L $directory -xtype l | while read file; do
    next_hop=$(readlink "$file")
    if [[ -e $next_hop ]]; then
      final=$(readlink -e "$file")
      echo "Got final path for $file --> $final"
      # Update the link
      ln -sf "$final" "$file"
    fi
done

Recursively re-link all multi-hop symlinks to directly link to final destination instead

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