It seems pretty straight forward to me, so maybe I'm missing something. readlink returns undef when you point it at a non-link, so... 

sub chase_links {
    my ( $file ) = @_;
    
    while ( defined ( my $link = readlink $file ) ) {
        print "LINK: $file";
        $file = $link;
    }
    print "NOT LINK: $file";
}

[download]

That will list out the links until it gets to a real file. You can insert any logic you like into that loop to short circuit or what-have-you. Is this problem harder than I think?

UPDATE: Oh, I guess it is harder than I thought. The above only works if all links are absolute or relative to the current directory. To work with scattered relative links, you'd have to chdir or track the base directories.

In reply to Re: Following symlinks manually by kyle
in thread Following symlinks manually by Tanktalus

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