Re: How to print the target of a symbolic link?

[Bob Proulx]

Peng Yu wrote:
> 'ls -l' shows the symbolic link and its target. I could parse the
> output. But I'm wondering whether there is a convenient command that
> only print the target if it is a symbolic link otherwise print
> nothing? Thank you for your help.

See the 'readlink' command.

  info coreutils 'readlink invocation'

     `readlink' outputs the value of the given symbolic link.  If
     `readlink' is invoked with an argument other than the name of a
     symbolic link, it produces no output and exits with a nonzero
     exit code.

Also 'find' generally very useful for selecting files.

Bob