I am not a powere shell script programmer this is probably basic thnk but I need to know how can I check if the provided path is a symlink or a regular path ?
I have a path /user/home/san/drive2
where drive2 is a symlink to
/drive at root level, so using what command in shell script I can check that the path is a symlink or regular path ?
Also, one can encounter, symlink at any path so how can we check recursively after each path separator whether it is a symlink or not ?
Look out the lstat() function.
In this check st_mode field: S_ISLNK(m)
Or you can do something like
if [ -L /path/to/file ]; then
echo "is a symlink!"
else
echo "not a symlink! maybe a directory or regular file, or does not exist"
end
You can use readlink -f /user/home/san/drive2 to get the canonical path behind. That is, the actual path without any symlink. A corollary is that if the result of readlink -f is any different from the argument you've given to it, then there's a symlink somewhere in the original path.
