readlink - read value of a symbolic link

places the contents of the symbolic link in the buffer which has size does not append a character to The call returns the count of characters placed in the buffer if it succeeds, or a -1 if an error occurs, placing the error code in the global variable A component of the path prefix is not a directory. The pathname contains a character with the high-order bit set. A component of a pathname exceeded 255 characters, or an entire path name exceeded 1023 characters. The named file does not exist. Search permission is denied for a component of the path prefix. Too many symbolic links were encountered in translating the pathname. The named file is not a symbolic link. An I/O error occurred while reading from the file system. extends outside the process's allocated address space.

HISTORY
The function call appeared in BSD 4.2.