On 06/19/2010 07:05 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan was caught red-handed while writing:: > 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? > > poc > > Here's one way your script can find what a symlink points to: $ file /usr/src /usr/src: symbolic link to `/sdb3/src' or $ ls -l /usr/src lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 May 30 17:18 /usr/src -> /sdb3/src/ For example you can ls -l /usr/src | awk '{ print $NF }' /sdb3/src/ Good luck. -- 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