Within a bash script, I know I can check if a file is a symbolic link with the following syntaxif [ -L $path ]Does any one know how I would test if that path was linked to a particular path? E.g. I want to check whether the target of $path is /some/where.
How to verify the target of a symbolic link points toward a particular path
bash;shell;symlink
If you want to check whether $path is a symbolic link whose target is /some/where, you can use the readlink utility. It isn't POSIX, but it's available on many systems (GNU/Linux, BusyBox, *BSD, ).if [ $(readlink -- $path) = /some/where ]; then Note that this is an exact text comparison. If the target of the link is /some//where, or if it's where and the value of $path is /some/link, then the texts won't match.Many versions of readlink support the option -f, which canonicalizes the path by expanding all symbolic links.Many shells, including dash, ksh, bash and zsh, support the -ef operator in the test builtin to test whether two files are the same (hard links to the same file, after following symbolic links). This feature is also widely supported but not POSIX.if [ $path -ef /some/where ]; then 