GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual
GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual
The truename of a file is the name that you get by following
symbolic links until none remain, then expanding to get rid of .
and .. as components. Strictly speaking, a file need not have a
unique truename; the number of distinct truenames a file has is equal to
the number of hard links to the file. However, truenames are useful
because they eliminate symbolic links as a cause of name variation.
file-truename returns the true name of the file
filename. This is the name that you get by following symbolic
links until none remain. The argument must be an absolute file name.
See Buffer File Name, for related information.