LNDIR(L) — LOCAL COMMANDS

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 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.

Note that RCS directories are not shadowed - they are symlinks to the real RCS directories.

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.

Ignore the diagnostics it generates about files already existing when it runs - those are the directories which it are real, and are created before the symlinking.

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.

ORIGIN

From the X11R2 distribution.

BUGS

You can write through symlinks and clobber the files sometimes. Strict RCS locking can prevent this. patch gets upset if it cannot change the files. 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.