Question

Windows native alternative for ln -s is mklink.

Is there any native alternative for readlink? Or how to natively identify if the file is symlink?

Answer 1

I don’t believe there’s any tool directly equivalent to readlink. But you can see in the output of dir whether an item is a symlink or not, so you can still determine this from the command line or in a script.

Test whether it’s a symlink or not

You can pretty easily test whether a given file is a symlink using syntax like:

 dir mysymlink  | find "<SYMLINK>" >NUL
 if not errorlevel 1  echo. It's a symlink!

Errorlevel will be 0 in the case that “<SYMLINK>” is found, and will be 1 otherwise.

Determine the target of a symlink

Determining the actual target of the symlink is another matter, and in my opinion not as straight-forward. The output of dir mysymlink | find "<SYMLINK>" might look like

11/13/2012  12:53 AM    <SYMLINK>      mysymlink [C:\Windows\Temp\somefile.txt]

You can parse this, but some of the characters make it difficult to deal with all in one variable, so I found it easier to deal with a temporary file:

 dir mysymlink | find "<SYMLINK>" > temp.txt
 for /f "tokens=6" %i in (temp.txt) do @echo %i

This yields output like [C:\Windows\Temp\somefile.txt]. (Remember to use %%i within any batch scripts; the above is from the command prompt.)

To get the result without the brackets, you can do something like:

 dir mysymlink | find "<SYMLINK>" > temp.txt
 for /f "tokens=6" %i in (temp.txt) do set answer=%i
 echo %answer:~1,-1%

The variable %answer% contains the result with the brackets, so %answer:~1,-1% is the result without the first or the last character.