In Bash, how do I safely determine what a soft link points to?

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?

Solution 1:

readlink -f <linkname>

See the readlink(1) man page for Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly or the GNU coreutils info page.

Solution 2:

stat <linkname>

Example:

stat /usr/local/cuda

First 2 lines will give:

File: '/usr/local/cuda' -> 'cuda-8.0'
Size: 8             Blocks: 0          IO Block: 4096   symbolic link
...