Does any of the Linux users here use symbolic links? What are your use cases?
I’m interested in using it for a desktop and server application.
Does any of the Linux users here use symbolic links? What are your use cases?
I’m interested in using it for a desktop and server application.
Kinda like for shortcuts under Windows. Like I symlink the daily Blender 2.83 Beta build directory to blender-2.83-beta-linux64 so my background render scripts dont have to be edited all the time.
isn’t it more powerful then that? isn’t it similar to pathing a directory?
IDK? I think you can use shortcuts for folders too? I don’t get to fancy with linking stuff around cuz it’s easy to make a mess of things…
You can. It’s very useful.
I use it for my webserver (nginx) config files.
Here’s an example off one of my Linux development workstations. All the lines with ->
are symlinks.
$ ls -l ~/.local/bin
total 36
drwxr-xr-x 7 zlynx zlynx 4096 Apr 20 13:16 android-studio
-rwxrwxr-x 1 zlynx zlynx 4268 Jul 13 2019 buddyinfo.py
lrwxrwxrwx 1 zlynx zlynx 23 Aug 19 2019 clang-format -> /usr/bin/clang-format-8
lrwxrwxrwx 1 zlynx zlynx 27 Aug 19 2019 git-clang-format -> /usr/bin/git-clang-format-8
lrwxrwxrwx 1 zlynx zlynx 42 Jun 22 2016 gorilla -> zdia-gorilla-modified//sources/gorilla.tcl
lrwxrwxrwx 1 zlynx zlynx 45 Aug 6 2019 gradle -> android-studio/gradle/gradle-5.1.1/bin/gradle
-rwxr-xr-x 1 zlynx zlynx 118 Feb 19 17:17 my-ninja
-rwxrwxr-x 1 zlynx zlynx 123 Feb 25 18:49 my-ninja-and-test
-rwx--x--x 1 zlynx zlynx 513 Mar 31 11:46 randbg
-rwxrwxr-x 1 zlynx zlynx 187 Mar 31 11:48 rsync-wallpaper
lrwxrwxrwx 1 zlynx zlynx 28 Jul 13 2019 studio.sh -> android-studio/bin/studio.sh
drwxrwxr-x 5 zlynx zlynx 4096 Jun 22 2016 zdia-gorilla-dac1d37
drwxrwxr-x 7 zlynx zlynx 4096 Jun 22 2016 zdia-gorilla-modified
Yeah, idk if I’d go looking for a reason to use one, but any time you want something in more than one place, ln -s
It’s mostly useful for developers as they can symlink a .bin
folder to their local path to test local binaries.
I’ve heard somone use it for game saves across multiple devices. I was wondering if it was worth using the symbolic linking to path a storage drive to the /home folder
Do you want to mount the whole drive as home? That’s a common thing to do, but doesn’t involve a symlink.
No. Maybe a folder or two. Years ago i saw a post on another forum where someone symbolicly linked the regular folders to a folders on a secondary drive (1-1).
Or people tracking dotfiles in a git repo
Uh, that’s not how a symlink works. A link isn’t a copy, it’s a shortcut, so you don’t get a backup from it.
I’ve got my ~/Music pointed at my array, but that means my /home partition has no /$USER/Music directory.
Isnt this the along the lines of hard and softlinks?
Are there any cool and nifty ways to do symlinks for the average desktop linux user? I guess savegame management is a thing I could do. Can I move savegames in a custom directory, like say in a NAS, then drop back a symlink from where I got save files from?
Symlinks are awesome!
First big usecase of mine that comes to mind, is stow - which I use to handle my dotfiles.
I have a simple Git repository, config
, that I store all my configurations on (e.g. I have config/ansible
and config/dotfiles
) - I just quickly
cd ~/config/dotfiles
stow git -t ~
and I’m up and running.