My very personal trick for files (not directories):
sed -i '' **/*
Note that I’m using ** which uses the bash globstar option, you may have to enable it beforehand:
shopt -s globstar
How it works
I trick sed to do the job, by using an implementation detail of the sed inplace mode.
sed is a tool to edit streams of text. The -i option of sed means inplace, the empty string '' is the instruction set: so there’s no instruction, sed will do nothing. **/* is a bash globstar pattern meaning “all files and all folders, at all depth, from here”.
The algorithm sed uses to edit a file inplace is:
- Create a temporary file as the output file,
- for each line in the input file:
- apply the transformation, write to the output file.
- Move the output file over the input file.
As I’m asking no transformations (the empty string), the algorithm can be simplified as:
- Create a temporary file,
- copy the content of the original file to the temporary file
- move the temporary file over the original file.
The temporary file is a real file, sed completly ignores that the input file was a symlink, it just reads it. So at the last step, when sed moves the temporary file over the real file, it “overwrite” the symlink with a real file, that’s what we wanted.
This also explains why it won’t work to transform a “symlink to a directory” to a real directory: sed works on file contents.