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Accepted
Devrim
Asked: 2010-01-12 10:53:22 +0800 CST

How to ls and know the target of symbolic links in one command line?

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I need to get the folder contents in one command line, right now if I do stat or ls, it tells me file type is Symbolic Link but it doesn't tell me if it's a file or a folder.

I'm using this;

stat -c '{"name": "%n", "size": "%s", "perms":"%a","type":"%F","user":"%U", "dereference","%N"}' /*;

Important point is, i need a one liner and very speedy output. I couldn't get around this doing ls, maybe there is a solution using find, locate etc. Or if u know how to read from mlocatedb ?

Thanks,

unix-shell

3 Answers

  1. ls -l will show you the target of a link. Is that what you need? Another option is readlink <file>.

    Oops, sorry, didn't read everything there. How about ls -lL. The -L tells ls to dereference the link, so you'll see the target there instead of the link.

    • 6

  2. stat also knows the option -L to dereference symlinks. Try your calls with this parameter.

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  3. Best Answer

    Try this which adds another field:

    stat -c '{L"name": "%n", "size": "%s", "perms":"%a","type":"%F","user":"%U", "dereference":"%N"}' /* | 
    sed '/\/\o47\"\}$/ {s/\}/,\"dir\":\"yes\"\}/;b}; s/\}$/,\"dir\":\"no\"\}/'

    By the way, I changed the comma after "dereference" to a colon.

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