On Sat, 2010-06-19 at 22:34 -0400, Sam Varshavchik wrote: > > Have I misunderstood what "ls -L" does? > > Yes, you did. The description of the -L option reads: > > -L, --dereference > when showing file information for a symbolic link, show > informa- > tion for the file the link references rather than for > the link > itself > > Here "file information" means attributes like the modification time, > the inode number, and such. OK, that makes sense. In fact it should have been obvious if I was were thinking clearly, given that the name is not an attribute of the file. As ever, man pages mean what they say, not what you think they say :-) > > better way of doing this? > > If you want to read the contents of a symbolic link, from a shell > script, use the "readlink" command. Great. Having cut my teeth on older versions of Unix where this didn't exist, I was unaware of it. Thanks Sam (and others who responded in the same vein). poc -- 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
