Daemon Dancing in the Dark

Symbolic Help

Today's obscure Unix command is namei, or the ol' "follow a pathname until a terminal point is found" command. You pass it a pathname and it will print out each "piece" of that path name, tell you what it is, and move down. This is particularly handy for figuring out what, if any, parts of a path are some kind of symbolic link. For instance, I have a partition mounted on /data, where I've created a folder for my user to use:

$ ls -l /data
total 20K
drwxr-xr-x 8 jdarnold users 4.0K Jun 21 14:58 jdarnold
drwx------ 2 root     root   16K May  4 15:54 lost+found
$ ls -ld data
lrwxrwxrwx 1 jdarnold users 14 May  7 10:21 data -> /data/jdarnold
$ namei /home/jdarnold/data/message.backup
f: /home/jdarnold/data/message.backup
 d /
 d home
 d jdarnold
 l data -> /data/jdarnold
   d /
   d data
   d jdarnold
 - message.backup

Not the most critical tool in your belt, but it still might come in handy, especially, as the man page says, in those times of "too many levels of symbolic links" errors.

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