Uses for symbolic links
Published on 24th April 2007 Estimated Reading Time: 1 minuteUNIX (and Linux) does a wonderful trick with its file and folder shortcuts; it effectively treats them as file and folder transporters that transfer associate a file or folder that exists in one folder hierarchy with another, and it is treated as if it exists in that hierarchy too. For example, the folder named images under /www/htdocs/blog can have a link under /www/htdocs/ that makes it appear that its contents exist in both places without any file duplication. For instance, the pwd command cannot tell a folder from a folder shortcut. To achieve this, I use what are called symbolic links and the following command achieves the outcome in the example:
ln -s /www/htdocs/blog/images /www/htdocs/images
The first file path is the destination for the link, while the second one is that for the link itself. Once, I had a problem with Google Reader not showing up images in its feed displays, so symbolic links rode to the rescue as they did for resolving a similar conundrum that I was encountering when editing posts in my hillwalking blog.