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.
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 recom-
pile 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, SCCS, and CVS.adm
directories are not sha-
dowed.
If you add files, simply 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.