Ygtjki

I want to test whether a file is a link to another link. I tried readlink but it doesn't work the way I need it:

ralph@bash4.4.12,1:~/subdir1 $ ll
lrwxrwxrwx 1 pi pi 13 Apr 10 14:34 hellolink -> subdir2/hello
lrwxrwxrwx 1 pi pi 9 Apr 10 14:34 hellolink2 -> hellolink
drwxr-xr-x 2 pi pi 4096 Apr 10 14:33 subdir2

Using readlink I now get either the canonicalized form of the ultimate target or the naked filename of the next link (hellolink):

ralph@bash4.4.12,1:~/subdir1 $ readlink -f hellolink2
/home/ralph/subdir1/subdir2/hello
ralph@bash4.4.12,1:~/subdir1 $ readlink hellolink2
hellolink

But what I need is the full path to the file that hellolink2 points at:

/home/ralph/subdir1/hellolink

Right now I'm doing something like this:

if [ -h "$(dirname hellolink2)/$(readlink hellolink2)" ] ; then 
 echo hellolink2 is a link
fi

That looks like a lot of overhead when I do it many times in a loop, using find to feed it the filenames.

Is there an easier way?

Use test -L (without readlink) to see if a file is a symbolic link.

if [ -L hellolink2 ]

Use realpath to get the absolute path of a symlink to a directory.

$ realpath hellolink2
/home/ralph/subdir1/hellolink

For what it's worth... following the suggestions in the comments above I rewrote the code that gets me the file that a link points to, even if that is another link, plus a few lines to test it:

#!/bin/bash

function nextlinked ()


header=""
add=" "
count=0

find / -print0 | while read -rd '' FILENAME ; do
 (( count++ ))
 if [ -h "$FILENAME" ] ; then # is this a link?
 filename="$FILENAME"
 printf "%6d " $count ; ls -ld "$filename" 2>&1
 filename="$(nextlinked "$filename" )"
 while [ "$filename" ] ; do
 header=$header$add
 printf "%6d %s" $count "$header" ; ls -ld "$filename" 2>&1
 filename="$(nextlinked "$filename")"
 done
 header=""
 fi
done

The question still stands: Is there an existing Linux command that does the job of the function nextlinked?