X Version 11 (Release 5)

lndir(XS)

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

Syntax

lndir fromdir [todir]

Description

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 (for example, ../src) and is relative to todir (not the current directory).

NOTE: RCS and SCCS directories are not shadowed.

Note that if you add files, you must run lndir again. Deleting files is a more painful problem; the symlinks will just point into never never land.

Known limitations

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.