Finding the original file of a symbolic link

So let’s say I have a symbolic link of a file in my home directory to another file on a different partition. How would I find the target location of the linked file? By this, I mean, let’s say I have file2 in /home/user/; but it’s a symbolic link to another file1. How would I find file1 without manually having to go through each partition/directory to find the file?

Answers:

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Method 1

Use readlink:

readlink -f /path/file

( last target of your symlink if there’s more than one level )

If you just want the next level of symbolic link, use:

readlink /path/file

You can also use realpath on modern systems with GNU coreutils (e.g. Linux), FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD or DragonFly:

realpath /path/file

which is similar to readlink -f.

Method 2

1.

ls -l bin

produce

lrwxrwxrwx 1 az az 14 Ноя 12 22:13 bin -> ../Gdrive/bin/

2.

file bin

produce

bin: symbolic link to `../Gdrive/bin/'

3.

stat bin

produce

File: «bin» -> «../Gdrive/bin/»

Method 3

Simplest way: cd to where the symbolic link is located and do ls -l to list the details of the files.

The part to the right of -> after the symbolic link is the destination to which it is pointing.

Ex:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 userName groupName 22 Jan 17 13:29 Link to temp.txt -> /home/user/temp.txt

Here we have “Link to temp.txt” that points to (->) “/home/user/temp.txt”.

But, like @Gilles Quenot points out, you can also just do readlink -f /path/to/symbolic_link

Method 4

Expanding on Costas

Suppose you have

ln -s test.txt sym_link_1.txt
ls -l sym_link_1.txt
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 a1 g1 8 Jan  7 16:59 sym_link_1.txt -> test.txt

In a script you can do (use backticks)

ln -s `readlink sym_link_1.txt` sym_link_2.txt

Then you have

ls -l sym_link_*.txt
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 a1 g1 8 Jan  7 16:59 sym_link_1.txt -> test.txt
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 a1 g1 8 Jan  7 17:01 sym_link_2.txt -> test.txt

Method 5

Another method (which are not answered previously) to find link files is to use the below command,

file -h <path_to_dir>/* | grep link

Command:

file -h /home/prateek/* | grep link

Output:

/home/prateek/Music: symbolic link to /media/prateek/HD-E1/Music

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0