parsing bin/ls for ftp -- knowing dir link vs file linked

[michaelh20]

When an FTP program needs to know when a linked file is directory or file, is this possible?

For example :
-rw-r--r-- 1 hoff0103 student 5454 May 15 15:36 stuff2.txt
lrwxrwxrwx 1 hoff0103 student 24 Aug 2 2001 web-docs -> /www/h/hoff0103/web-docs

How can a program know that web-docs is a directory (it is a dir) and not a file?


I don't see a way to this outside of looking at extensions and guessing that certain extensions = a File...
Naturally, could try to retrieve or to CD to that link and see what happens, but this would be a bit painful, if this had to happen lots of times to figure out a whole dir list.

 

[Nothinman]

Since unix isn't tied to file extensions like Windows is the only real way to know for sure is to investigate the target file, normally this would be a stat() system call to get it's attributes and see if it's normal or a directory, through FTP cwd would probably be the easiest.