In Bash, how do I safely determine what a soft link points to?

stat <linkname>

Example:

stat /usr/local/cuda

First 2 lines will give:

File: '/usr/local/cuda' -> 'cuda-8.0'
Size: 8             Blocks: 0          IO Block: 4096   symbolic link
...

readlink -f <linkname>

See the readlink(1) man page for Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly or the GNU coreutils info page.