Find directory and replace with symlink

Question

I'm trying to find and replace multiple directories with symlinks, but I have no idea how to do it.

I have 2 root folders, lets say /var/www/html and /var/www/html2 and they both contain the same files and folders, for example

/var/www/html/project1/lib/config
/var/www/html2/project1/lib/config
/var/www/html/project2/v1/lib/config
/var/www/html2/project2/v1/lib/config
/var/www/html/project2/v2/lib/config
/var/www/html2/project2/v2/lib/config

What I want to do is search /var/www/html and replace all config folders with a symlink to the same folder in /var/www/html2, but only if config is inside a lib folder

I understand that I will have to remove the existing directory (rm -r /var/www/html/project1/lib/config) and then create the symlink (ln -s /var/www/html2/project1/lib/config /var/www/html/project1/lib/config)

I can do this manually, but I'd like to create a 1 liner or shell script to do this.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Using bash's recursive globbing:

shopt -s globstar
cd /var/www/html
for d in **/lib/config
do
    echo rm -r "$d"
    echo ln -s /var/www/html2/"$d" "$d"
done

Run with echo to check, run without it to actually do the linking.