readlink —
display target of a symbolic link
readlink |
[-fnqsv] [file ...] |
The readlink utility displays the target of a symbolic
link. If a given argument file is not a symbolic link
and the -f option is not specified,
readlink will print nothing to standard output about
that file and eventually exit with an error status. If
the -f option is specified, the output is
canonicalized by following every symlink in every component of the given path
recursively. readlink will resolve both absolute and
relative paths, and, if possible, return the absolute pathname corresponding
to file. In this case, the argument does not need to be
a symbolic link.
The options are as follows:
-f
- Canonicalize the pathname of file, as described
above.
-n
- Do not force a newline to appear after the output for each
file.
-q
- Suppress failure messages if calls to
lstat(2) fail. This is the
default for
readlink.
-s
- This is an alternative to
-q.
-v
- Turn off quiet mode.
readlink will display errors
about files for which
lstat(2) fails. This is the
inverse of -q and -s.
The readlink utility appeared along with
stat, within which it is integrated, in
NetBSD 1.6.
The stat utility was written by Andrew
Brown ⟨atatat@NetBSD.org⟩. The original combined man page
was written by Jan Schaumann
⟨jschauma@NetBSD.org⟩.