Go Systems Programming

About symbolic links

Symbolic links are pointers to files or directories, which are resolved at the time of access. Symbolic links, which are also called soft links, are not equal to the file or the directory they are pointing to and are allowed to point to nowhere, which can sometimes complicate things.

The following Go code, saved in symbLink.go and presented in two parts, allows you to check whether a path or file is a symbolic link or not. The first part is as follows:

package main 
 
import ( 
   "fmt" 
   "os" 
   "path/filepath" 
) 
 
func main() { 
   arguments := os.Args 
   if len(arguments) == 1 { 
         fmt.Println("Please provide an argument!") 
         os.Exit(1) 
   } 
   filename := arguments[1] 

Nothing special is happening here: you just need to make sure that you get one ...