How to see full absolute path of a symlink

Question

realpath isn't available on all linux flavors, but readlink should be.

readlink -f symlinkName

The above should do the trick.

Alternatively, if you don't have either of the above installed, you can do the following if you have python 2.6 (or later) installed

python -c 'import os.path; print(os.path.realpath("symlinkName"))'

realpath <path to the symlink file> should do the trick.

unix flavors -> ll symLinkName

OSX -> readlink symLinkName

Difference is 1st way would display the sym link path in a blinking way and 2nd way would just echo it out on the console.

Another way to see information is stat command that will show more information. Command stat ~/.ssh on my machine display

File: ‘/home/sumon/.ssh’ -> ‘/home/sumon/ssh-keys/.ssh.personal’
  Size: 34          Blocks: 0          IO Block: 4096   symbolic link
Device: 801h/2049d  Inode: 25297409    Links: 1
Access: (0777/lrwxrwxrwx)  Uid: ( 1000/   sumon)   Gid: ( 1000/   sumon)
Access: 2017-09-26 16:41:18.985423932 +0600
Modify: 2017-09-25 15:48:07.880104043 +0600
Change: 2017-09-25 15:48:07.880104043 +0600
 Birth: -

Hope this may help someone.

You can use awk with a system call readlink to get the equivalent of an ls output with full symlink paths. For example:

ls | awk '{printf("%s ->", $1); system("readlink -f " $1)}'

Will display e.g.

thin_repair ->/home/user/workspace/boot/usr/bin/pdata_tools
thin_restore ->/home/user/workspace/boot/usr/bin/pdata_tools
thin_rmap ->/home/user/workspace/boot/usr/bin/pdata_tools
thin_trim ->/home/user/workspace/boot/usr/bin/pdata_tools
touch ->/home/user/workspace/boot/usr/bin/busybox
true ->/home/user/workspace/boot/usr/bin/busybox