LNDIR(1) LNDIR(1)
NAME
lndir - create a shadow directory of symbolic links to
another directory tree
SYNOPSIS
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 use-
ful 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 sym-
links 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 direc-
tory).
Note that 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.
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.
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