readlink

© September 2005 Tony Lawrence

Symbolic links can sometimes be confusing, particularly when one symbolic link includes another in its path:

lrwxrwxrwx   1 pcunixapl pcunixapl        18 Sep  6 10:23 foo-web -> vhosts/foo-web.com
lrwxrwxrwx   1 pcunixapl pcunixapl        19 Sep  5 05:54 vhosts -> /home/httpd/vhosts/
 

You can quickly resolve symbolic links with readlink:

$ readlink vhosts
/home/httpd/vhosts/
readlink foo-web
vhosts/foo-web.com
 

But that foo-web isn't really 100% true, because "vhosts" is another symbolic link itself. If you want it to follow the trail, use "readlink -f":

$ readlink -f foo-web
/home/httpd/vhosts/foo-web.com
 

There are a couple of other options to readlink that make it easy to use in shell scripts; it's always nice when the author of a utility pays attention to little details like that.

Got something to add? Send me email.

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