This is a very simple program to manage symlinks in your information collection or file systems.
The program has various modes of operation. All modes support -n / --dry-run to print what would happen without actually making any changes on disk.
Also known as diagnose mode.
better-symlinks diagnose <path> will output a list of symlinks that are broken under folder path.
Also known as sed mode.
better-symlinks sed <expression> <path> will use a sed extended regular expression script (typically a s/ search and replace one) on every symlink under path and replace the target of the symlink with the results of the expression. Very useful to mass rename targets of symlinks. Suppose you have the following symlinks pointing to various targets:
/folder/symlink->/oldfolder/target/folder/another symlink->/oldfolder/target2
and suppose that you renamed /oldfolder to /newfolder. Now all your symlinks under /folder are broken.
This mode fixes that. Running better-symlinks sed 's|/oldfolder|/newfolder|' /folder should replace /oldfolder in the broken symlinks to /newfolder, yielding valid symlinks again.
Also known as relativize mode.
better-symlinks relativize <path> will make all symlinks under path into relative symlinks, irrespective of file system; this is in some sense better than what the standard symlinks tool does, since that tool ignores other file systems, and that behavior cannot be turned off in that tool. The tool will not modify any symlinks that don't point to existing files.