How to get the fully resolved path of a symbolic link in Terminal?
I think that pwd -P and readlink are going to be your friends for this task.

"How can I get the behavior of GNU's readlink -f on a Mac?" is a handy resource.

pwd -P only works if you're inside the symlink directory:

14:07:13 jason@mac ~ $ cd bin
14:08:08 jason@mac bin $ pwd -P
/Users/jason/Applications


readlink works by specifying the target (thus it can be used against files):

14:09:03 jason@mac ~ $ readlink bin
Applications

14:09:34 jason@mac ~ $ readlink /var
private/var


The output of readlink appears to be relative to the parent of the specified target.

Ex: The parent of /var is /, so private/var is correct, relative to /. Per my above example of bin -&gt; Applications, both are in my Home Directory, no matter where I run it, the output is the same.