readlink —
display target of symbolic link on standard output
The
readlink utility when invoked with the pathname of a
symbolic link as its argument dereferences the symbolic link and prints the
name of target on standard output. If the
-f option is
not specified and
readlink is invoked with an argument
other than the pathname of a symbolic link, it exits with a nonzero exit code
without printing anything.
The options are as follows:
-f- Canonicalize by following every symlink in every component of the given
path recursively.
readlink will resolve both
absolute and relative paths and return the absolute pathname corresponding
to file. The argument does not need to be a symbolic
link.
-n- Do not print a trailing newline character.
The readlink utility exits 0 on success,
and >0 if an error occurs.
The readlink utility first appeared in
OpenBSD 2.1.
![[OpenBSD]](/openbsd.gif){kind=small}