How to show actual path in Nemo?

[Rander]

I'm on a standard Cinnamon installation with Nemo. I have it set up to show the full path in the title of the windows. So far, so good.

On my desktop, I have a symbolic link that points to a folder elsewhere in the file system - in this example, lets call the link "Link" and the folder it points to "/foo/bar". When I open that, Nemo shows the location as /home/user/Desktop/Link, and not as /foo/bar/ as I would expect (and prefer).

So how do I make it show the actual location as the title?

[rene]

If you in Desktop itself rclick Link you have an option to "Follow link to original fie".

The sense in which that doesn't fully addresses your want however is also the sense in which said want is non-general and I would personally say not generally valid even. As reflected most directly in your title you think of a path containing a symlink as "not real" but there's really not much to that view. At any level above the specific filesystem's internal one, Desktop/Link is just as valid a pathname for /foo/bar than latter is, and certainly I for example definitely expect to be in Desktop/Link rather than in /foo/bar when I say cd ~/Deskop/Link. Have in fact some scripts around that switch on the pathname by which something is accessed.

Yes, that's different from a GUI tool such as Nemo, and e.g. pwd moreover hasn't a -P option for nothing, as much as many tools have "follow symlink" options not for nothing. But that's just as Nemo then when you in fact open a link in the above rclick way. I suppose I wouldn't mind it having an option like e.g. pwd -P so that it always resolves symlinks in the pathname --- and I can't currently think of any reason why it couldn't --- but in a fundamental sense I do feel you seem to take it too much for granted that a symlink is "not real". Any path to a given destination is as valid as any other, and while one containing symlink(s) can at least be canonicalized in the manner you suggest, with actual links (aka. hard links) not even that is the case; there any pathname is not even just "as valid" but in all senses "as real".

This is to say that your expectation "more or less" violates a fairly fundamental principle of our filesystems, in which filesystem objects have not necessarily only one valid pathname by which to access them.

[Rander]

Okay rene, that actually makes a lot of sense. I never really thought about it that way...

[rene]

I actually just now noticed a bit of a PS to my own post when rmdir foo with foo a symlink to a directory bar told me that foo was 'Not a directory'. Well, indeed, it was a symlink to one, but if my above statement "At any level above the specific filesystem's internal one, Desktop/Link is just as valid a pathname for /foo/bar than latter is" were true to the level to which I in fact intended it to be, rmdir should not have been able to notice even really, certainly not complain.

So please consider that specific statement perhaps a bit more nuanced than I implied --- but certainly it's all very much the case for hard links, and I more or less insist on not conceptually discriminating between those types of links ("and hard links were first!"). As such the general conceptual idea as expressed by it is still "the more right one" as far as I'm concerned.