Is there a way to check if there are symbolic links pointing to a directory?
I'd use the find command.
find . -lname /particular/folderThat will recursively search the current directory for symlinks to /particular/folder. Note that it will only find absolute symlinks. A similar command can be used to search for all symlinks pointing at objects called "folder":
find . -lname '*folder'From there you would need to weed out any false positives.
You can audit symlinks with the symlinks program written by Mark Lord -- it will scan an entire filesystem, normalize symlink paths to absolute form and print them to stdout.
There isn't really any direct way to check for such symlinks. Consider that you might have a filesystem that isn't mounted all the time (eg. an external USB drive), which could contain symlinks to another volume on the system.
You could do something with:
for a in `find / -type l`; do echo "$a -> `readlink $a`"; done | grep destfolderI note that FreeBSD's find does not support the -lname option, which is why I ended up with the above.