linux man page for namei

NAMEI(1)						      General Commands Manual							  NAMEI(1)

NAME
       namei - follow a pathname until a terminal point is found

SYNOPSIS
       namei [options] pathname...

DESCRIPTION
       namei uses its arguments as pathnames to any type of Unix file (symlinks, files, directories, and so forth).  namei then follows each path-
       name until an endpoint is found (a file, a directory, a device node, etc).  If it finds a symbolic link, it shows the link, and starts fol-
       lowing it, indenting the output to show the context.

       This program is useful for finding "too many levels of symbolic links" problems.

       For each line of output, namei uses the following characters to identify the file type found:

	  f: = the pathname currently being resolved
	   d = directory
	   l = symbolic link (both the link and its contents are output)
	   s = socket
	   b = block device
	   c = character device
	   p = FIFO (named pipe)
	   - = regular file
	   ? = an error of some kind

       namei prints an informative message when the maximum number of symbolic links this system can have has been exceeded.

OPTIONS
       -l, --long
	      Use the long listing format (same as -m -o -v).

       -m, --modes
	      Show the mode bits of each file type in the style of ls(1), for example 'rwxr-xr-x'.

       -o, --owners
	      Show owner and group name of each file.

       -n, --nosymlinks
	      Don't follow symlinks.

       -v, --vertical
	      Vertically align the modes and owners.

       -x, --mountpoints
	      Show mountpoint directories with a 'D' rather than a 'd'.

AUTHOR
       The original namei program was written by Roger Southwick <rogers@amadeus.wr.tek.com>.

       The program was re-written by Karel Zak <kzak@redhat.com>.

BUGS
       To be discovered.

SEE ALSO
       ls(1), stat(1)

AVAILABILITY
       The namei command is part of the util-linux package and is available from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.

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