In PowerShell, symbolic links (symlinks) appear pretty transparently when you’re simply navigating the file system. If you’re doing other work, though, like changing ACLs, bumping into symlinks can be a pain. Here’s how to tell if a directory in question is a symlink or not.

Consider the following commands.

PS C:\Users\ThmsRynr> ((get-item c:\symlink).Attributes.ToString())
Directory, ReparsePoint

PS C:\Users\ThmsRynr> ((get-item c:\normaldir).Attributes.ToString())
Directory

Here, we’re just running a Get-Item command on two locations, getting the Attributes property and converting to a string. The first item is a symlink and includes “ReparsePoint” in its attributes. The second item is a normal directory and does not include “ReparsePoint”.

So that means we can do something as easy as this.

PS C:\Users\ThmsRynr> ((get-item c:\symlink).Attributes.ToString() -match "ReparsePoint")
True

PS C:\Users\ThmsRynr> ((get-item c:\normaldir).Attributes.ToString() -match "ReparsePoint")
False

Easy. If the above values have “ReparsePoint” in them, we know they are a symlink and not just a regular directory. In my case, my script to apply ACLs to a group of directories avoided symlinks with ease.