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Suppose that I want to get the real path of a symlink. I know that both readlink and stat system calls can dereference the link and give me its real path. Do they operate in the same way (only regarding the dereferencing, I know that stat does lots more)? Should I prefer one over the other?
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A symlink (also called a symbolic link) is a type of file in Linux that points to another file or a folder on your computer. Symlinks are similar to shortcuts in Windows. Some people call symlinks "soft links" – a type of link in Linux/UNIX systems – as opposed to "hard links."
We can use the -l option of rsync for copying symlinks. rsync copies the symlinks in the source directory as symlinks to the destination directory using this option. Copying the symlinks is successful in this case. rsync copied file1 to destination_directory.
readlink -f /path/file ( last target of your symlink if there's more than one level ) If you just want the next level of symbolic link, use : readlink /path/file
Get real path (absolute path) from symbolic link (aka. softlink) On Linux/Unix/Mac systems one can create symbolic links (aka. softlinks) to a file or a directory using the ln -s TARGET or ln -s TARGET LINK . Behind the scenes a symbolic link is just a file that has the TARGET as the content.
( last target of your symlink if there's more than one level ) If you just want the next level of symbolic link, use : readlink /path/file Edit 2020:
You can use awk with a system call readlink to get the equivalent of an ls output with full symlink paths. For example: Show activity on this post. Then if I use the symlink to goto dir: cd game If I issuethe cmd: pwd, the actual directory you're in is: ~
Use stat() to tell you about the file at the end of any chain of symlinks; it does not get you the path in any way. Use lstat()
to get information about the symlink, if any, that is referred to; it acts like stat() when the name given is not a symlink. Use readlink() to obtain the path name stored in the symlink named as its argument (beware — it does not null terminate the string).
If you want the full pathname of the file at the end of the symlink, you can use
realpath(). This gives you an absolute pathname which does not cross any symlinks to reach the file.
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Yeah, you should use readlink() for that. However, notice that it requires that you allocate a buffer to store the dereferenced path in. lstat() can help if you want to allocate a buffer of the exact size that is required, as is shown in the example at the bottom of the readlink() man page.
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