Common Operations of Symbolic Links on Linux

Symbolic link or soft link files are very common and useful on Linux/Unix systems. It works as a alias file for a file. You can create a symbolic links and it can operate transparently for most operations just as normal files. Programs that read or write to files named by a symbolic link behaves as if operating directly on the target file.

Let’s look at the common techniques and tools to play with symbolic link files on Linux.

Create a symbolic link

To create a symbolic link file in the current directory to a target file, say, ../target:

$ ln -s ../target

This will create a symbolic link file target in the current directory.

You can also give it a different name, say tt:

$ ln -s ../target ./tt

Check whether a file is a symbolic link in Bash

In Bash script, we can easily test whether a file is a symbolic link by the file test operator -h. For example:

if [ -h $file ]; then
    echo "a symbolic link"
fi

Find out the target of a symbolic link file

Use the [[man:1|readlink|readlink]] command.

To find out the target of the ./tt we created:

$ readlink ./tt

With these basic tools, we can combine them with scripts to be some powerful tools.

To find out the canonical target (dereference every symlink in every component) of the ./tt we created:

$ readlink -f ./tt