NAME

readlink - displays the target of a symbolic link

SYNOPSIS

readlink [-fn] file(s) ...

DESCRIPTION

The readlink utility, when called with one or more pathes of a symbolic link as its argument, displays the real path/target of it at the standard output.

It accepts the following options:

-f

Follows the symbolic link until it reaches the original target, recursively.

-n

Does not print a newline character at the end of the output string. This option is ignored if readlink is used with more than one path as its argument.

If readlink is invoked without the -f option and with a non-symbolic link path as its argument, the path will not be printed to the screen.

EXAMPLES

The readlink utility may be used at shell scripts for displaying/modifying the real file behind a symbolic link.

For instance, here is an example of how to read both the current directory and the path of a program behind a process on the /proc directory — via the proc(5) file system.

readlink -f /proc/`ps -a | nawk '/vim/{ print $1; exit; }'`/{cwd,exe}

SEE ALSO

ln(1), ls(1), file(1), readlink(2), realpath(3)

HISTORY

The readlink utility first appeared in OpenBSD 2.1, NetBSD 1.6 and FreeBSD 4.10.

The GNU variant, which supports multiple files as input, was written by Dmitry V. Levin and first appeared in GNU coreutils 4.5.5 in February 2, 2003.