Calculating the target of a symlink

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

A script I'm writing needs to work out the target of a symbolic link,
i.e. given:

$ touch foo
$ ln -s foo bar

the function should print bar when given foo as a parameter. The manual
says "ls -L" should do this, but it doesn't seem to work:

$ touch foo
$ ln -s foo bar
$ ls -l foo bar
lrwxrwxrwx 1 poc poc 3 Jun 19 21:32 bar -> foo
-rw-rw-r-- 1 poc poc 0 Jun 19 21:32 foo
$ ls -L bar
bar

(should give foo)

Have I misunderstood what "ls -L" does? Is there a bug? And is there a
better way of doing this?

poc