In Bash, how do I safely determine what a soft link points to?

bash symlink
swestrup picture swestrup · Jul 18, 2010 · Viewed 17.5k times · Source

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?

Answer

eduffy picture eduffy · Jul 18, 2010

readlink -f <linkname>

See man 1 readlink

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