Find only destination of symlink

Question

For use in a shell-script, I'm looking for a commandline-way to get the destination of a symbolic link. The closest I've come so far is stat -N src, which outputs src -> dst. Of course I could parse the output and get dst, but I wonder if there is some direct way of getting the destination.

Answer 1

Another option would be to use the specifically designed command readlink if available.

Answer 2

Portably: no luck except using heuristics to parse ls -l output, or use perl -le 'print readlink("some-file")'

some systems have a readlink command, some with a -f option to obtain the absolute path.

There are various implementations of a stat command as a wrapper for the stat/lstat system calls. The GNU one is not useful in that regard, but zsh's builtin one is more so:

zmodload zsh/stat
stat +link the-link

Still with zsh, you can get the absolute path of a file (removes every symlink component) with the :A modifier (applies to variable expansion, history expansion and globbing:

~$ gstat -c %N b
`b' -> `a'
~$ var=b
~$ echo $var:A
/home/me/a
~$ echo b(:A)
/home/me/a
~$ echo ?(@:A)
/home/me/a

Answer 3

This can be done using GNU find: find src -prune -printf "%l\n".