If you use a linux distro that uses the alternatives framework, from time to time you might need to know where or what those symlinks eventually point to; this was the case for me when I needed to know where my JRE home was... and
which java wasn't helping me (much).
Google introduced me to
readlink which has an
-e or
-f option which basically switches on recursion.
So something like
readlink -f `which java` told me what I needed to know.
I went a step further and created two aliases in my
~/.bash_aliases file (sourced from
~/.bashrc), like so:
alias rle='readlink -e'
alias rlf='readlink -f'
So
rlf `which java` saves you 7 key presses.
All things considered the speed up is probably going to be marginal, but everything helps right?