LNDIR(1) manual page

NAME

lndir - create a shadow directory of symbolic links to another directory tree

Lndir makes a shadow copy todir of a directory tree fromdir, except that the shadow is not populated with real files but instead with symbolic links pointing at the real files in the fromdir directory tree. This is usually useful for maintaining source code for different machine architectures. You create a shadow directory containing links to the real source which you will have usually NFS mounted from a machine of a different architecture, and then recompile it. The object files will be in the shadow directory, while the source files in the shadow directory are just symlinks to the real files.

This has the advantage that if you update the source, you need not propagate the change to the other architectures by hand, since all source in shadow directories are symlinks to the real thing: just cd to the shadow directory and recompile away.

The todir argument is optional and defaults to the current directory. The fromdir argument may be relative (e.g., ../src) and is relative to todir (not the current directory).

Note that RCS, SCCS, and CVS.adm directories are not shadowed.

If you add files, simply run lndir again. Deleting files is a more painful problem; the symlinks will just point into never never land.

BUGS

Patch gets upset if it cannot change the files. You should never run patch from a shadow directory anyway.

You need to use something like find todir -type l -print | xargs rm
to clear out all files before you can relink (if fromdir moved, for instance). Something like find . \! -type d -print
will find all files that are not directories.

Table of Contents

NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

BUGS