Java 1.6 - determine symbolic links

Question

In a DirectoryWalker class I want to find out if a File instance is actually a symbolic link to a directory (assuming, the walker walks on UNIX systems). Given, I already know the instance is a directory, would the following be a reliable condition to determine the symbolic link?

File file;
// ...   
if (file.getAbsolutePath().equals(file.getCanonicalPath())) {
    // real directory ---> do normal stuff      
}
else {
    // possible symbolic link ---> do link stuff
}

Answer 1

Java 1.6 does not provide such low level access to the file system. Looks like NIO 2, which should be included in Java 1.7, will have support for symbolic links. A draft of the new API is available. Symbolic links are mentioned there, creating and following them is possible. I'm not exactly sure that which method should be used to find out whether a file is a symbolic link. There's a mailing list for discussing NIO 2 - maybe they will know.

Answer 2

It looks like getCanonicalPath() can do other things that might make it different from the absolute path.

This method first converts this pathname to absolute form if necessary, as if by invoking the getAbsolutePath() method, and then maps it to its unique form in a system-dependent way. This typically involves removing redundant names such as "." and ".." from the pathname, resolving symbolic links (on UNIX platforms), and converting drive letters to a standard case (on Microsoft Windows platforms).

But it might work for the vast majority of your use cases; your mileage may vary.

Answer 3

That should work.

Answer 4

The technique used in Apache Commons uses the canonical path to the parent directory, not the file itself. I don't think that you can guarantee that a mismatch is due to a symbolic link, but it's a good indication that the file needs special treatment.

This is Apache code (subject to their license), modified for compactness.

public static boolean isSymlink(File file) throws IOException {
  if (file == null)
    throw new NullPointerException("File must not be null");
  File canon;
  if (file.getParent() == null) {
    canon = file;
  } else {
    File canonDir = file.getParentFile().getCanonicalFile();
    canon = new File(canonDir, file.getName());
  }
  return !canon.getCanonicalFile().equals(canon.getAbsoluteFile());
}

Answer 5

This isn't a pure Core Java solution, but it is a solution:

http://www.onyxbits.de/content/blog/patrick/how-deal-filesystem-softlinkssymbolic-links-java

This works on using a shared object to detect whether a directory is a symbolic link. It should work for you just fine...

Hope that helps...