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How To Check Where A Symbolic Link (Symlink) Points To In Windows 7

As mentioned previously, I’m a strong proponent of symlinks and use them on Windows 7 a lot to save space, sometimes you may wonder where the heck this symlink is actually pointing to

Quick Answer: Use DIR, follow steps 1-5

1. Step On Windows 7: Open the Start Menu and enter cmd.exe into the search and open the item that pops up

2. Step Now go back to your folder where the folder is that includes the symbolic link

3. Step Click right into the address bar and copy the full path

4. Step Now switch back to the still oepned cmd command prompt window and enter

cd – then right-click onto the window and select Paste

5. Step Now – if the path is on a different partition e.g. D or E then enter E: or D: depending on your own drive letters. Enter just that and hit enter and it will then switch to the correct path we cd’d into in step 4

Using The DIR Command To See Where Junctions Points / Symbolic Links Are Pointing To

6. Step Now, finally enter DIR

7. Step You’re done, you can see the full path the symbolic link is pointing to

8. Step In this case, the symbolic link is pointing to a folder on the E drive. Now you can check if that folder exists the link is pointing to and if it doesn’t you can re-create it

Getting Used To Symbolic Links Syntax: Further Resources

You probably may want to read through a couple of our previous guides that explain the syntax

Syntax of mklink to create junction points