dired: copy a symlink'd file

Question

dired-do-copy copies a symlink as a symlink. Sometimes I want to copy the actual file of a symlink, not make a copy of the symlink. Is there already a way to do that? I can write some elisp code but seems this must be already builtin to dired.

Answer 1

Not that I can see.

You could use: ! cp -L ? <newname> RET

If you want to roll your own, C-hf file-truename is the elisp function that chases symlinks to return the fully-dereferenced file name.