How do I get the target of a symlink?

Question

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

Basically I want the same that I'd get through this bit of hackery:

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

but I want to do it without shelling out.

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 said

Answer 3

Or you can try:

File.realpath("symlink_path")

Which works for both symlinks and normal files.