readlink(1) - NetBSD Manual Pages

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READLINK(1)             NetBSD General Commands Manual             READLINK(1)


NAME

     readlink -- display target of a symbolic link


SYNOPSIS

     readlink [-fnqsv] [file ...]


DESCRIPTION

     The readlink utility displays the target of a symbolic link.  If a given
     argument file is not a symbolic link and the -f option is not specified,
     readlink will print nothing to standard output about that file and even-
     tually exit with an error status.  If the -f option is specified, the
     output is canonicalized by following every symlink in every component of
     the given path recursively.  readlink will resolve both absolute and rel-
     ative paths, and, if possible, return the absolute pathname corresponding
     to file.  In this case, the argument does not need to be a symbolic link.

     The options are as follows:

     -f          Canonicalize the pathname of file, as described above.

     -n          Do not force a newline to appear after the output for each
                 file.

     -q          Suppress failure messages if calls to lstat(2) fail.  This is
                 the default for readlink.

     -s          This is an alternative to -q.

     -v          Turn off quiet mode.  readlink will display errors about
                 files for which lstat(2) fails.  This is the inverse of -q
                 and -s.


SEE ALSO

     realpath(1), stat(1), lstat(2), readlink(2)


HISTORY

     The readlink utility appeared along with stat, within which it is inte-
     grated, in NetBSD 1.6.


AUTHORS

     The stat utility was written by Andrew Brown <atatat@NetBSD.org>.  The
     original combined man page was written by Jan Schaumann
     <jschauma@NetBSD.org>.

NetBSD 10.1                      June 22, 2022                     NetBSD 10.1