Same, I was scratching my head, wondering why the author of the article doesn't just use readlink... and then a few hours later, a coworker of mine asked why my

Same, I was scratching my head, wondering why the author of the article doesn't just use readlink... and then a few hours later, a coworker of mine asked why my bash script isn't working on her Mac! Turns out readlink on OS X doesn't have the same flags. I ended up substituting it out for the hackier but more portable method that the article uses.