How to find out if a symbolic link points to a missing directory?

Question

I have a symbolic link to a directory that does not exist:

~/ramdisk -> /dev/shm/mydir

When running my Python code, I get the error:

FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '~/ramdisk'

How can I avoid this error, detecting beforehand the fact the directory is missing?

The only method I found is symlink(), which creates a symbolic link.

Answer 1

The whole point of symlinks is that ~/ramdisk is treated essentially the same as /dev/shm/mydir would be unless you are doing symlink specific operations.

import os
os.path.exists('~/ramdisk')
# or, as suggested by Stephen:
from pathlib import Path
Path('~/ramdisk').is_dir()

would all be the same as if you used checked /dev/shm/mydir instead.