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.
readlink(2),
realpath(3)
The
readlink utility first appeared in
OpenBSD 2.1.
![[OpenBSD]](/openbsd.gif){kind=small}