Symbolic links in Linux is clever, I’ll give them that, but they are a headache, and quite often cause even more headaches than what they are worth as far as I’m concerned. Nevertheless, if you do you a colour-coded shell like the bash that I use on my Ubuntu server installs, then here is a quick way for viewing where exactly those misleading turquoise files and folder actually point to!
To dereference a symbolic link, use GNU readlink:
readlink -f /path/to/symlink
As an added bonus, if you want just the directory of the file a symbolic link links to, wrap everything up in a call to dirname:
dirname $(readlink -f /path/to/symlink)
And now you know exactly what that little bugger is pointing to.
