Yeah but what do you do if your are not using shell?

Hint: it's stat(2) (or equivalent in your language library)

Additional hint: if using pythons os.stat set follow_symlinks to false. It recently took me an embarrassing long time to figure out why my script was failing to find symlinks.

but they were using a shell script in this blog though (and, yes, stat(2) is the way to go there)

> checks if a file is a symlink

to expand on that:

"In computing, a symbolic link (also symlink or soft link) is a file whose purpose is to point to a file or directory (called the "target") by specifying a path thereto."