Where symbolic link points to
Hi!
How can I find where a symbolic link points to from a shell script?
I have the follwing problem:
Let's suppose the follwing files:
#ls -l /tmp
-rw-r--r--1 rootother 18 Aug 28 18:18 file
drwxr-xr-x2 rootother178 Aug 28 18:33 mydir
# ls -l /tmp/mydir
lrwxrwxrwx1 rootother 7 Aug 28 18:33 link -> ../file
I would need a command which could return me the file path and name where my link is pointing in order to use it in a shell script.
I found in the ls man page that:
-LIf an argument is a symbolic link, lists the file or
directory the link references rather than the link
itself.
but if I run
# ls -lL /tmp/mydir/link
I got:
-rw-r--r--1 rootother 18 Aug 28 18:18 /tmp/mydir/link
which is very strange because the permissons are the original file's permissions but the name is the link's name.
Thanks.
[935 byte] By [
pityq] at [2007-11-26 9:46:11]
# 4
> Yes, I could to parse the result of "ls -l" but my
> problem is that ther I can find the relative path (in
> my case ../file) instead of absoluth path ( /tmp/file
> ) and I need the absolute path.
The absolute path depends on how it's mounted. So you have to figure out where you are, add the relative path to that, then figure out what the absolute path is. There's no system function to do this (most things don't care about ever calculating an absolute path).
Can I ask why you want to calculate the absolute path? Why can't you just operate on the link itself?
Perl has some modules to do this conversion symbolically (in other words, you feed it the paths, and it gives you the answers. It doesn't traverse the filesystem, but it may call cwd() to find the current directory).
See File::Spec and the rel2abs() function.
--
Darren
# 5
I'm using the Solaris Security Toolkit and making a customized script for it.
I want to make some change in a file and before this I create a backup of it using one of the above mentioned SST's functions. This backup operation will create a record in a manifest file based on which I will be able to make an undo operation. (it will copy the backed up file to its original location).
The problem is that if I'm referring to the file with it's relative path name then this will be stored to the manifest file and during the undo operation I can't change directories.
pityq at 2007-7-7 0:50:51 >
