Distinguishing a regular file from a symlink

Question

I'm writing a bash script that needs to distinguish a regular file from a symlink. I thought I could do this with if/test expression, but it doesn't work as I expected to:

$ touch regular_file
$ test -f regular_file; echo $?
0
$ test -h regular_file; echo $?
1
$ ln -s regular_file symlink
$ test -h symlink; echo $?
0
$ test -f symlink; echo $?
0

Why is that? And, how can I properly do this?

Answer 1

It looks like you are just scrambling your tests a bit. You don't need to run both test, the only one you need for this case is the -h one to tell you if the file is a symlink.

test -h file && echo "is symlink" || echo "is regular file"

The -f test only tells you if the object is a file. This would return 0 if it was a directory or a device node or a symlink to a directory, but will return 1 on a symlink to a file.

If you also needed to know if it was a symlink to a file rather than a directory, you would need to combine the results of both tests with a little bit of logic.

Answer 2

@Caleb is correct about making the script just test for the symlink. However the part about why was left out and I was curious. If you look at the coreutils source code and strace the output of test you can see that when you run the symbolic link test it uses lstat and if you using the -f test it actually calls 'stat' which follows the symlink:

$ ln -s varnish_config XXX
$ strace -s 2000 test -L XXX 2>&1 | grep XXX
execve("/usr/bin/test", ["test", "-L", "XXX"], [/* 47 vars */]) = 0
lstat("XXX", {st_mode=S_IFLNK|0777, st_size=14, ...}) = 0

$ strace -s 2000 test -L varnish_config 2>&1 | grep varnish
execve("/usr/bin/test", ["test", "-L", "varnish_config"], [/* 47 vars */]) = 0
lstat("varnish_config", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0664, st_size=1046, ...}) = 0

$ strace -s 2000 test -f XXX 2>&1 | grep XXX
execve("/usr/bin/test", ["test", "-f", "XXX"], [/* 47 vars */]) = 0
stat("XXX", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0664, st_size=1046, ...}) = 0

From the stat man page:

   stat() stats the file pointed to by path and fills in buf.

   lstat() is identical to stat(), except that if path is a symbolic link,
   then the link itself is stat-ed, not the file that it refers to.

This means the -f test will return true as long as the filename specified is a symlink to a regular file or a regular file itself.