How to check if a symlink, not the file it points to, exists in Rust?

Question

Path::exists is not suitable, since its documentation states:

This function will traverse symbolic links to query information about the destination file. In case of broken symbolic links this will return false.

Answer 1

Another option is to use std::fs::symlink_metadata (docs).

Query the metadata about a file without following symlinks. This function will return an error ... [when] path does not exist.

The upside of this is that the returned Metadata struct contains a FileType struct (docs), which you can query about whether the path is a plain file, a directory or a symbolic link. This could be useful if the possible outcomes were more than "link exists" and "link does not exist".

Answer 2

std::fs::read_link seems what you want.

This function will return an error in the following situations, but is not limited to just these cases:

• path is not a symbolic link.
• path does not exist.