Directory – Create Symbolic Link Relative to Current Directory

directorylnsymlink

I'm trying to create a symbolic link in my home directory that points to a directory on my external HDD.

It works fine when I specify it like this:

cd ~
ln -s /run/media/name/exhdd/Data/ Data

However it creates a faulty link when I try this:

cd /run/media/name/exhdd
ln -s Data/ ~/Data

This creates a link that I cannot cd into.

When I try, bash complains:

bash: cd: Data: Too many levels of symbolic links

The Data symbolic link in my home is also colored in red when ls is set to display colored output.

Why is this happening? How can I create a link in that manner? (I want to create a symlink to a directory in my working directory in another directory.)

Edit: according to this StackOverflow answer, if the second argument (in my case that'd be ~/Data) already exists and is a directory, ln will create a symlink to the target inside that directory.

However, I'm experiencing the same issue with:

ln -s Data/ ~/

Best Answer

Here's what's happening. If you make a symlink with a relative path, the symlink will be relative. Symlinks just store the paths that you give them. They never resolve paths to full paths. Running

$ pwd
/usr/bin
$ ln -s ls /usr/bin/ls2

creates a symlink named ls2 in /usr/bin to ls(viz. /usr/bin/ls) relative to the directory that the symlink is in (/usr/bin). The above command would create a functional symlink from any directory.

$ pwd
/home/me
$ ln -s ls /usr/bin/ls2

If you moved the symlink to a different directory, it would cease to point to the file at /usr/bin/ls.

You are making a symlink that points to Data, and naming it Data. It is pointing to itself. You have to make a symlink with the absolute path of the directory.

ln -s "$(realpath Data)" ~/Data

Related Solutions

Directory – Why Can’t List File/Directory Relative to .. from a Symlink Directory

It is special behavior of bash's cd builtin; the relative file behavior is the natural one. Once you follow a symbolic link, you are in the actual path of the target and the original path information is lost; but if you use bash or zsh to cd there then the shell remembers the original path and uses it in future relative cd commands. But not in relative filename references, because bash doesn't actually know if you intended a filename or something else.

If you look at the cd documentation in bash, you'll see there are -L and -P options which tell it whether to use "logical" (remembering the original path) or "physical" (using the filesystem's idea) paths.

If you need to have the "logical" behavior at all times, you need to use a --bind mount (on Linux; Solaris and other OSes call it "loopback" or other things) instead of a symlink.

How to Create Symbolic Links with Wildcards in Linux

You might want to do that:

for dir in dir1 dir2
do
  [[ ! -d /somedir/$dir ]] && mkdir /somedir/$dir    
  find /media/sd*/$dir -type f -exec bash -c \
    '[[ ! -f /somedir/'$dir'/$(basename $1) ]] && ln -s $1 /somedir/'$dir'/' foo {} \;
done

This create symbolic links in /somedir/dir1/ (resp. dir2) pointing to all files present under /media/sd*/dir1 (resp. dir2). This script doesn't preserve hierarchy that might be present under the source directories.

Edit: Should you want all the links to be placed in a single directory, here is a slightly modified version:

[[ ! -d /somedir/data ]] && mkdir /somedir/data    
find /media/sd*/dir[12] -type f -exec bash -c \
    '[[ ! -f /somedir/data/$(basename $1) ]] && ln -s $1 /somedir/data/' foo {} \;
done

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Directory – Why Can’t List File/Directory Relative to .. from a Symlink Directory

How to Create Symbolic Links with Wildcards in Linux

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