Run diff on symlinks

Question

I have two folders containing a number of broken symlinks.

Is there a way to make diff compare the target of the links instead of trying to follow the links?

Answer 1

With 'content of the links' I assume you mean 'target of the link'. If that's correct, then yes, there is. Sort of. And you have to get creatie with shell redirection :)

diff -u <(find /path/to/dir1 -type l -print0 | xargs -0 ls -ld | sort) <(find /path/to/dir2 -type l -print0 | xargs -0 ls -ld | sort)

What this does is run diff with as input the output of two commands:

find /path/to/dir1 -type l -print0 | xargs -0 ls -ld | sort
find /path/to/dir1 -type 2 -print0 | xargs -0 ls -ld | sort

These find | ls | sort commands display all symlinks it can find in dir1 and dir2, together with their targets. So the net result is that you'll see which symlinks are different.