How do I get the target of a symlink?

Question

I have a string containing the file system path to an existing symlink. I want to get the path that this link points to.

Basically I want the same that I'd get through this bit of hackery:

s = "path/to/existing/symlink" `ls -ld #{s}`.scan(/-> (.+)/).flatten.last 

but I want to do it without shelling out.

Answer 1

I think readlink is what you are looking for:

File.readlink("path/to/symlink") 

Answer 2

require 'pathname' Pathname.new("symlink").realpath 

or readlink as others said