How To Find What Symlink Points To

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To some this may seem like a trivial task, but I see great interest from Unix/Linux beginners arriving to this blog: how exactly does one confirm what a symlink points to?

First of all, if you haven't already done so - read my Unix Symlink Example post to learn what a symlink is and to refresh your mind about creating symlinks.

If you're still reading, perhaps a bit more explanations are needed.

Since symlink is nothing but a special Unix file, you can use all the standard Unix commands to work with it - list it or remove it for example.

Listing symlinks

For listing files, the most obvious choice is a Unix ls command, and the way you use it to list symlink is the same way you'd list any other file:

ubuntu$ ls ubuntu-release 
ubuntu-release

Now we come to exactly the reason why some people don't find working with symlinks obvious: when we list the symlink, we expect to see the file it points to. More precisely, we expect to see the name of this file.

Showing what a symlink points to

To show what a symlink points to, you need to use a long format of the ls command:

ubuntu$ ls -l ubuntu-release 
lrwxrwxrwx 1 greys greys 10 2008-03-23 16:53 ubuntu-release -> /etc/issue

As you can see, the ubuntu-release symlink points to the /etc/issue file.