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Read Symbolic Link

The Read Symbolic Link operation reads a symbolic link from the system. This operation is supported in version 2025-07-05 and later only for File Shares with NFS protocol enabled.

Protocol availability

Enabled file share protocol Available
SMB No
NFS Yes

Request

The Read Symbolic Link request is constructed as follows. We recommend that you use HTTPS.

Method Request URI HTTP version
GET https://myaccount.file.core.windows.net/myshare/mydirectorypath/mysymboliclink?restype=symboliclink HTTP/1.1
GET https://myaccount.file.core.windows.net/myshare/mydirectorypath/mysymboliclink?restype=symboliclink&sharesnapshot=<DateTime> HTTP/1.1

Replace the path components that are shown in the request URI with your own, as described in the following table:

Path component Description
myaccount The name of your storage account.
myshare The name of your file share.
mydirectorypath Optional. The path to the directory where the symbolic link is present.
mysymboliclink The name of the symbolic link.

For information about path-naming restrictions, see Name and reference shares, directories, files, and metadata.

URI parameters

You can specify the following additional parameters on the request URI:

Parameter Description
timeout Optional. The timeout parameter is expressed in seconds. For more information, see Set timeouts for file service operations.
sharesnapshot Optional. The sharesnapshot parameter is an opaque DateTime value that, when present, specifies the share snapshot to query for the symbolic link.

Request headers

The required and optional request headers are described in the following table:

Request header Description
Authorization Required. Specifies the authorization scheme, account name, and signature. For more information, see Authorize requests to Azure Storage.
Date or x-ms-date Required. Specifies the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) time for the request. For more information, see Authorize requests to Azure Storage.
x-ms-version Required for all authorized requests. Specifies the version of the operation to use for this request. This operation is supported in version 2025-05-05 and later for File Shares with NFS protocol enabled.

For more information, see Versioning for the Azure Storage services.
x-ms-client-request-id Optional. Provides a client-generated, opaque value with a 1-kibibyte (KiB) character limit that's recorded in the logs when logging is configured. We highly recommend that you use this header to correlate client-side activities with requests that the server receives. For more information, see Monitor Azure Files.
x-ms-file-request-intent Required if Authorization header specifies an OAuth token. Acceptable value is backup. This header specifies that the Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts/fileServices/readFileBackupSemantics/action or Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts/fileServices/writeFileBackupSemantics/action should be granted if they are included in the RBAC policy assigned to the identity that is authorized using the Authorization header. Available for version 2022-11-02 and later.
x-ms-allow-trailing-dot: { <Boolean> } Optional. Version 2022-11-02 and later. The Boolean value specifies if a trailing dot present in request url should be trimmed or not.

This header is ignored if the target is located on a File Share with NFS protocol enabled, which supports trailing dot by default.

For more information, see Naming and referencing shares, directories, files, and metadata.

Request body

None.

Sample request

Request Syntax:
GET https://myaccount.file.core.windows.net/myshare/mysymboliclink?restype=symboliclink HTTP/1.1
Request Headers:
x-ms-version: 2025-07-05
x-ms-date: Thu, 13 Mar 2025 06:58:30 GMT
Authorization: SharedKey myaccount:YhuFJjN4fAR8/AmBrqBz7MG2uFinQ4rkh4dscbj598g=

Response

The response includes an HTTP status code and a set of response headers.

Status code

A successful operation returns status code 200 (OK). For information about status codes, see Status and error codes.

Response headers

The response for this operation includes the headers in the following table:

Response header Description
Date A UTC date/time value that's generated by the service, which indicates the time when the response was initiated.
ETag The ETag contains a value that represents the version of the file. The value is enclosed in quotation marks.
Last-Modified Returns the date and time when the file was last modified. The date format follows RFC 1123. For more information, see Represent date/time values in headers.

Any operation that modifies the directory or its properties updates the last modified time. Operations on files don't affect the last modified time of the directory.
x-ms-request-id Uniquely identifies the request that was made and can be used for troubleshooting the request. For more information, see Troubleshoot API operations
x-ms-version Indicates the Azure Files version that's used to execute the request.
x-ms-link-text The path to the target file stored in the symbolic link as link text. The path is percent encoded.
x-ms-client-request-id Used to troubleshoot requests and their corresponding responses. The value of this header is equal to the value of the x-ms-client-request-id header if it's present in the request and the value contains no more than 1,024 visible ASCII characters. If the x-ms-client-request-id header isn't present in the request, it isn't present in the response.

Response body

None.

Sample response

Response Status:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Response Headers:
Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2025 06:58:31 GMT
ETag: "0x8DD61FC7700E64D"
Last-Modified: Thu, 13 Mar 2025 06:58:31 GMT
x-ms-version: 2025-07-05
x-ms-link-text: myfile
Server: Windows-Azure-File/1.0 Microsoft-HTTPAPI/2.0

Authorization

Only the account owner may call this operation.

Remarks

If the share does not exist, then the operation fails with the status code 404/'Not Found' (ShareNotFound).

If the parent directory of the symbolic link does not exist, then the operation fails with the status code 404/'Not Found' (ParentNotFound).

See also

Operations on Files