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readlink: Reading Symbolic Links

The readlink system call retrieves the target of a symbolic link.
Unusually, readlink does not NUL-terminate the target path that it fills into the buffer. It does, however, return the number of characters in the target path, so NUL-terminating the string is simple.
The small http://siber.cankaya.edu.tr/SystemsProgramming/cfiles/print-symlink.c program in Fig. 8.7 prints the target of the symbolic link specified on its command line.

Figure 8.7: Print the Target of a Symbolic Link.
$\begin{figure}\begin{center} \small \begin{verbatim}...$
```
$ ln -s /usr/bin/wc my_link
$ ./print-symlink my_link
```

**Figure 8.7:** Print the Target of a Symbolic Link.
$\begin{figure}\begin{center} \small \begin{verbatim}...$

Cem Ozdogan 2007-05-16