MacOS – Symbolic links, why doesn’t this work:

command linemacosterminalunix

me$ ln -s ~/x/y/ ~/Desktop/
ln: /Users/me/Desktop//: File exists

Why does this attempt at creating a symbolic link to ~/x/yon the Desktop now work? The only way I can seem to get something like a symbolic link is this way:

ln -s * ~/Desktop/

I'm confused, this was really simple in Ubuntu.

Best Answer

Alternatively, you can do

ln -s ~/x/y ~/Desktop/

(note there's no slash '/' character after ~/x/y/).

I think the error message is not the most informative, but I understand it as that if you're putting a trailing slash, you're referring to the content of your directory (in this case ~/x/y), but if you omit it, you're referring to the directory itself.

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