How to get the target of a symbolic link?

Question

I have a line containing the file system path to an existing symbolic link. I want to get the path that this link points to.

Basically, I want me to go through this bit of a hacker:

s = "path/to/existing/symlink" `ls -ld #{s}`.scan(/-> (.+)/).flatten.last 

but I want to do this without going around.

Answer 1

I think readlink is what you are looking for:

 File.readlink("path/to/symlink") 

Answer 2

 require 'pathname' Pathname.new("symlink").realpath 

or readlink as others have said

Answer 3

Or you can try:

 File.realpath("symlink_path") 

Works for both symbolic links and regular files.