Read File Symbolic Links

Description

Find out if a file path is a symbolic link, and if so what it is linked to, via the system call readlink.

Symbolic links are a POSIX concept, not implemented on Windows but for most filesystems on Unix-alikes.

Usage

Sys.readlink(paths)

Arguments

Value

A character vector of the same length as paths. The entries are the path of the file linked to, "" if the path is not a symbolic link, and NA if there is an error (e.g., the path does not exist or cannot be converted to the native encoding).

On platforms without the readlink system call, all elements are "".

See Also

file.symlink for the creation of symbolic links (and their Windows analogues), file.info

Examples

##' To check if files (incl. directories) are symbolic links:
is.symlink <- function(paths) isTRUE(nzchar(Sys.readlink(paths), keepNA=TRUE))
## will return all FALSE when the platform has no `readlink` system call.
is.symlink("/foo/bar")