bup-validate-ref-links(1) Bup 0.33.10+
Author: Rob Browning rlb@defaultvalue.org
Date: 2026-01-28

# NAME

bup-validate-ref-links - check repository refs for links to missing objects

# SYNOPSIS

bup validate-ref-links [ref…]

# DESCRIPTION

`bup validate-ref-links` checks repository references (e.g. saves) for commits or subtrees that refer to missing objects and reports the paths to any found. If no refs are provided, checks all refs, otherwise only checks those specified.

This command can also be used to validate a save more quickly than attempting a `restore` or `join`ing the save to /dev/null, and much more quickly for multiple related saves, though it only checks for the existence of the leaf (blob) data, it does not attempt to read that data.

At the moment, the broken path information is only logged to standard error, and is not well specified (i.e. suitable for inspection, but not parsing).

Also note that the current implementation may not report all paths to a given missing object because it only examines each unique tree or commit object once, no matter how often it appears within the refs being examined. This means that in order to find every broken save, you would need to run the command separately for each ref, which is likely to be much more expensive than a combined run because it can’t skip subtrees that it has encountered before.

# EXIT STATUS

The exit status will be 1 if any broken links are found, 0 if none are found, and some other positive integer for other failures.

# SEE ALSO

`bup-fsck`(1), `bup-join`(1), `bup-restore`(1)

# BUP

Part of the `bup`(1) suite.