Shell script to replace some files with symlinks

Question

Some servers support ftp for downloading files.

When I export a project from my subversion repository to my windows machine, all symlinks (linux) are replaced with placeholder files:

link ../www_public/images

after downloading all exported files i am now using

find | xargs grep -P ^ link

to find all those placeholders. Then I replace them with the actual symlink manually.

I would really like to automate this step with a shell-script.
How should I do it?

Note:
If there is a better / great solution to this problem, feel free to share it :)

+1

Jacco Dec 13. '08 at 16:27

1 answer

Bill karwin · Accepted Answer · 2008-12-13T18:07:32+0000

Here's one possible solution:

:
grep -lr '^link' . | while read placeholderfile
do
  linkfile=`cut -c6- "$placeholderfile"`
  ln -sf "$linkfile" "$placeholderfile"
done

edit: changed the code above wrt comments below.