Find only destination of symlink

On Mac OS X and FreeBSD/NetBSD/etc. it's:

stat -f %Y <filename> 

More generically I guess the solution is (stat --printf=%N uses weird quotes):

ls -l b | sed -e 's/.* -> //' 

Example:

# ln -s a b # stat -f %Y b a 

Another method is:

# find b -maxdepth 0 -printf %l a# 

The last line is mangled because it has no newline, but that is fine if you need the result in a variable, like so

# f=$(find b -maxdepth 0 -printf %l) # echo $f a 

The -maxdepth is needed to prevent find from descending into directories if b happens to be a directory.

This can be done using GNU find: find src -prune -printf "%l\n".

realpath command of coreutils package,

as linked in readlink command's manual page.

for example:

realpath /bin/python 

outputs

/usr/bin/python2.7 

on my machine.

On a system where I have no readlink or stat commands but I do have Python 2.x, I'm using a short script:

#!/usr/bin/env python import os, sys if __name__ == "__main__": src = sys.argv[1] target = os.readlink(src) if not os.path.isabs(target): target = os.path.abspath(os.path.join(os.path.dirname(src), target)) print target 

Note that unlike readlink -f this may only follow one level of symlink.

Portable pure Bash realpath

bash_realpath() { # print the resolved path # @params # 1: the path to resolve # @return # &1: the resolved link path local path="${1}" while [[ -L ${path} && "$(ls -l "${path}")" =~ -\>\ (.*) ]] do path="${BASH_REMATCH[1]}" done echo "${path}" } 

Portably: no luck except using heuristics to parse ls -l output, or use perl -le 'print readlink("some-file")'

some systems have a readlink command, some with a -f option to obtain the absolute path.

There are various implementations of a stat command as a wrapper for the stat/lstat system calls. The GNU one is not useful in that regard, but zsh's builtin one is more so:

zmodload zsh/stat stat +link the-link 

Still with zsh, you can get the absolute path of a file (removes every symlink component) with the :A modifier (applies to variable expansion, history expansion and globbing:

~$ gstat -c %N b `b' -> `a' ~$ var=b ~$ echo $var:A /home/me/a ~$ echo b(:A) /home/me/a ~$ echo ?(@:A) /home/me/a 

Added a pure sh version, hoping it to be more portable if bash is not installed :

$ cat ./realpath.sh #!/usr/bin/env sh bash_realpath() { # print the resolved path # @params # 1: the path to resolve # @return # &1: the resolved link path for path;do while [ -L "${path}" ] do path="$(\ls -l "${path}" | awk '{print $NF}')" done which "${path}" done } bash_realpath "$@" 

Use case :

$ ./realpath.sh $(which gcc python) /usr/bin/x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc-6 /usr/bin/python2.7