circular soft links

I don't think you can make a  symbolic link to point to themselves.

Just ask yourseft a question, do you think the following command work ?
   ln -s test test
   The answer is NO !

yuzh - yes, you can have symbolic links point to themselves -- they just have to be in different directories...

For example, try this:

mkdir 1
mkdir 2
ln -s ./1/mylink  ./2/mylink
ln -s ./2/mylink  ./1/mylink

The links are now circular....

cotec1:

Here's a command that I tried out and it seems to do a little of what you want:

find -follow -type l  

(that's an ell after the word "type")

It will produce an error message similar to this for each invalid symlink:

find: <link name>: No such file or directory


However, this will report ALL broken symlinks.  I'm not really sure how to figure out (programatically) if the links are circular or not...  But, using the output of the find command, you should be able to track this down manually -- pretty quickly, too, unless you've got tons and tons of broken links...

You certainly can create a symlink that points to itself ...

[blowfish@blowfish blowfish]$ ls -l xyzzy
lrwxrwxrwx    1 blowfish blowfish        5 Jul  2 13:26 xyzzy -> xyzzy

Now, how did I do that?

[blowfish@blowfish blowfish]$ ln -s xyzzy .

How to find them?  I will post my answer in a few moments