On Sun, Jun 20, 2010 at 7:35 AM, Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > A script I'm writing needs to work out the target of a symbolic link, > i.e. given: > > $ touch foo > $ ln -s foo bar > > the function should print bar when given foo as a parameter. The manual > says "ls -L" should do this, but it doesn't seem to work: > > $ touch foo > $ ln -s foo bar > $ ls -l foo bar > lrwxrwxrwx 1 poc poc 3 Jun 19 21:32 bar -> foo > -rw-rw-r-- 1 poc poc 0 Jun 19 21:32 foo > $ ls -L bar > bar > > (should give foo) > > Have I misunderstood what "ls -L" does? Is there a bug? And is there a > better way of doing this? > Yes. ls -L gives you information about the symlynk as if it were the original file. It is only really useful if you use it in conjunction with -l. Try `ls -Ll bar` to see what I'm talking about. readlink is the correct command to get this information. -- Siddhesh Poyarekar http://siddhesh.in -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
