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I need to process a number of directories, determine what files in them are symlinks, and what they link to. This sounds simple, but I have no control over the presence of control or other characters in the file names, and I need a robust solution.

So, given a file of arbitrary name, how do I safely determine what it links to, when the link destination can also have arbitrary contents?

Dennis Williamson
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swestrup
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2 Answers2

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readlink -f <linkname>

See the readlink(1) man page for Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly or the GNU coreutils info page.

Cristian Ciupitu
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eduffy
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    I didn't use the `-f` option in mac because it gave me an error `readlink: illegal option -- f` – Jonathan Morales Vélez Jun 11 '20 at 14:31
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    @JonathanMoralesVélez - that only matters if you have a link to another link and want the final non-symlink file. If that matters, install Homebrew and use the GNU version of readlink. – eduffy Jul 07 '20 at 21:49
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stat <linkname>

Example:

stat /usr/local/cuda

First 2 lines will give: 

File: '/usr/local/cuda' -> 'cuda-8.0'
Size: 8             Blocks: 0          IO Block: 4096   symbolic link
...
Konstantinos Roditakis
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