cleanlinks(1)

cleanlinks1

Remove dangling symbolic links and empty directories

Usage

cleanlinks

Overview

The cleanlinks program searches the directory tree descended from the current directory for symbolic links whose targets do not exist, and removes them. It then removes all empty directories in that directory tree.

cleanlinks is useful for cleaning up a shadow link tree created with lndir(1) after files have been removed from the real directory.

Diagnostics

A message will be printed upon encountering each dangling symlink and empty directory.

Releases

11 releases since Debian 4.0 (Etch); the text changed 6 times.

  1. 4.0–5.0
  2. 6.0
  3. 7
  4. 8–11
  5. 12
  6. 13
  7. Arch

Author

The version of the cleanlinks utility included in this X.Org Foundation release was originally written by David Dawes as a part of XFree86.

Colin Watson wrote this manual page, originally for the Debian Project.

From imake 1.0.11-1 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Parsed by carta from the page's man source.