Native alternative for readlink on Windows

No need to redirect the stdout to a temp.txt file. You can simply do this in one line:

for /f "tokens=6" %i in ('dir mysymlink ^| FIND "<SYMLINK>"') do @echo %i

Also note that the above method by Lars only applies to "file" symlinks. That method has to be adjusted for directory symlinks since passing a directory to the "dir" command will list out that directories actual contents (which won't have itself in there)

So you would use:

for /f "tokens=6" %i in ('dir mysymlink* ^| FIND "<SYMLINKD>"') do @echo %i

Note the inclusion of the * in the dir call and the addition of the "D" in the FIND

The asterisk will prevent dir from listing the contents of that directory.

To further simplify the process to work for either file or directory symlinks, you would simply always include the asterisk and for the FIND argument you would change it to a partial match so that it matches with or without "D" on the end

for /f "tokens=6" %i in ('dir mysymlink* ^| FIND "<SYMLINK"') do @echo %i

And finally, since that method actually returns the file inside the brackets [].. you would be better off delimiting those, leaving you with the final method:

for /f "tokens=2 delims=[]" %i in ('dir mysymlink* ^| FIND "<SYMLINK"') do @echo %i

I don't believe there's any tool directly equivalent to readlink. But you can see in the output of dir whether an item is a symlink or not, so you can still determine this from the command line or in a script.

Test whether it's a symlink or not

You can pretty easily test whether a given file is a symlink using syntax like:

 dir mysymlink  | find "<SYMLINK>" >NUL if not errorlevel 1  echo. It's a symlink!

Errorlevel will be 0 in the case that "<SYMLINK>" is found, and will be 1 otherwise.

Determine the target of a symlink

Determining the actual target of the symlink is another matter, and in my opinion not as straight-forward. The output of dir mysymlink | find "<SYMLINK>" might look like

11/13/2012  12:53 AM    <SYMLINK>      mysymlink [C:\Windows\Temp\somefile.txt]

You can parse this, but some of the characters make it difficult to deal with all in one variable, so I found it easier to deal with a temporary file:

 dir mysymlink | find "<SYMLINK>" > temp.txt for /f "tokens=6" %i in (temp.txt) do @echo %i

This yields output like [C:\Windows\Temp\somefile.txt]. (Remember to use %%i within any batch scripts; the above is from the command prompt.)

To get the result without the brackets, you can do something like:

 dir mysymlink | find "<SYMLINK>" > temp.txt for /f "tokens=6" %i in (temp.txt) do set answer=%i echo %answer:~1,-1%

The variable %answer% contains the result with the brackets, so %answer:~1,-1% is the result without the first or the last character.