I need to process a number of directories, determine what files in them are symlinks, and what they link to. This sounds simple, but I have no control over the presence of control or other characters in the file names, and I need a robust solution.
So, given a file of arbitrary name, how do I safely determine what it links to, when the link destination can also have arbitrary contents?
readlink -f <linkname>
See the readlink(1) man page for Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly or the GNU coreutils info page.