Inspecting Symlink with readlink

There are a few ways to know that a file is a symlink. Here’s one I learned today.

All my dotfiles are symlinks because I store them outside of the root directory. Here’s a conventional way to inspect a symlink:

ls -l ~/.zshrc
lrwxr-xr-x@ 1 jake  staff  37 Jul 21 17:28 /Users/jake/.zshrc -> /Users/jake/code/dotfiles/./.zshrc

How do we know it’s a symlink? The l at the beginning of the permissions list and the arrow -> are two clues.

Another options of inspecting a symlink is readlink:

readlink ~/.zshrc
/Users/jake/code/dotfiles/./.zshrc

It returns the symlink path. Files that aren’t symlinks do not return a path.

Tested on macOS 26 with zsh 5.9. See man readlink for more.