tracing symlinks

Boldra has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I've got a bunch of symlinks in a directory which (intentionally) don't have as much info in the filename as the original files. I need to find out the name of the original file, but I can't see how to do this in perl. I also would like to make the solution as portable as possible (it may have to run on windows)

I can see a similar topic came up in the Broken symlinks discussion, but the only solution that displayed the destination links was using perl2find and wasn't portable.

I've had a bit of a poke around on cpan, but I can't see anything appropriate, and I'd rather not use a non-standard lib anyway.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Comment on tracing symlinks

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: tracing symlinks by Boldra (Deacon) on May 08, 2001 at 14:09 UTC
Ok the absurdity of my question only just hit me. Symlinks on windows??? Go on laugh. I'll use `system(ls)` like cLive ;) suggested in the chatterbox.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: tracing symlinks by busunsl (Vicar) on May 08, 2001 at 14:27 UTC
What about the readlink function?	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: tracing symlinks by Masem (Monsignor) on May 08, 2001 at 15:22 UTC
That would work, except that it does "die" on a system without symlinks. I think , however, a combination of this and the '-l' test would do the trick, wrapping the readlink function in an eval (even suggested as such in the eval POD to handle platform specific features). Something along the lines of: `my $filename = "something"; while ( -l $filename ) { eval { $filename = readlink $filename } }` [download] Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com \|\| "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain	[reply] [d/l]
Re: tracing symlinks by Cybercosis (Monk) on May 08, 2001 at 19:23 UTC
WELL... I'd go with readlink() on *NIX systems, but if it MUST run on windows and cope with windows links, then if you open the .lnk file, there should be a complete path to whatever you're looking in about 200-300 bytes in. If you just snarf the whole file (it's a links, it shouldn't be all that big) and then regex the bugger (UNTESTED!): `$file =~ /([list\|of\|acceptable\|drive\|letters]\:.+)/` [download] That ought to (sorta) work. ~Cybercosis	[reply] [d/l]


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