Sometimes one stumbles across a command that they probably should have known about for a while. Today, for me, that command is namei ‘follow a pathname until a terminal point is found’. As it says, one of the really nice things it can do is resolve chains of symlinks showing each link in the chain.

For example:

$ namei /usr/share/dict/words
f: /usr/share/dict/words
 d /
 d usr
 d share
 d dict
 l words -> /etc/dictionaries-common/words
   d /
   d etc
   d dictionaries-common
   l words -> /usr/share/dict/american-english
     d /
     d usr
     d share
     d dict
     - american-english

Incidentally, setting the dictionary to British (presuming only one dictionary that matches the regex ^british is installed) can be done like this:

select-default-wordlist --set-default='^british'