is there a cmd to resolve symbolic links in a given path?

for example, if
dir1 -> dir2,
dir3 -> ../
dir4 -> dir5

then if i gave the cmd this path:
dir1/dir3/dir4

it would return the resolved links, which would be:

dir2/../dir5

or more simply:
dir5

If anyone knows of such a cmd let me know, I'm writing this in shell script, but there are a lot of considerations to take into account.

thanks,
JC

Try
$ stat -L -c%n $SYMLINK
which means:
-L follow the symbolic link
-c%n Only show the file name

Hope I could help,
mschutte

ttilt - Thanks for the stat command - wasn't aware of it.

However doing what you said on my system it returned the name of the link rather than the name of the file the link points to which is what I think mschutte was asking for.

A quick way to do it would be:

ls -l file |awk '{print $NF}'

The ls -l would show the file and its link - the awk would break the line up into fields (using whitespace as the delimiter) and the $NF would tell it to print the last field which would be the file to which the link is pointing.

You could create this as a function within your script to use it multiple times.

It's been a while since the question was asked, but you can also use readlink from the GNU core utilities, which is meant to do just this.