Saturday, 14 September, 2019 UTC
Summary
Symbolic links allow you to links files and directories to other files and directories. They go by many names including symlinks, shell links, soft links, shortcuts, and aliases. At a glance, a symbolic link looks like just a file or directory, but when you interact with them, they will actually interact with the target at the other end. Think of them like worm holes for your file system.
Getting started The system call necessary to create symbolic links tends to be readily available on Unix-like and POSIX-compliant operating systems. The command we’ll be using to create the links is the
ln command.You’re welcome to use the files on your system to mess around with, but I thought it would be nice to provide a few lines of code to setup an environment for following along with this post:
$ mkdir -p /tmp/symlinks/{one,two} $ cd /tmp/symlinks $ echo "one" > ./one/one.txt $ echo "two" > ./two/two.txt If you were to run
tree, it should look like this:$ tree . ├── one │ └── one.txt └── two └── two.txt 2 directories, 2 files Perfect, let’s get to linking!
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By default, the
ln command will make hard links instead of symbolic, or soft, links.To ensure that we’re creating symbolic links, we’ll want to pass the
-s or --symbolic argument to the ln command.What’s a hard link anyway?
Hard links link directly to the inode where the item resides on the disk, instead of acting as a pointer to the original file, the way symbolic links do. What you end up with is a copy of the original and any changes to the original will not be reflected.
Hard links serve their purpose in the world, but should be avoided when linking inside of of a
git repository as they cause a ton of confusion.From my own experience, I’m always using symbolic links, but never hard links. As I write this, I’m wondering why I have yet to alias
ln to ln -s to save a few keystrokes:alias ls="ln -s" As mentioned, symbolic linking is effectively like creating a file that contains the target’s filename and path.
Because it’s simply a reference to the original file, any changes that are made to the original will be immediately available via the symbolic link.
Some of my favorite uses for symbolic links are to create local directories in my home directory that point to files being synchronized by Dropbox or to link
current to the latest build of a project in a directory that is dynamically named and includes a date and time.Given the files we created earlier in the getting started section, let’s go ahead and try linking the
one directory to the three directory:$ ln -s one three Now we should have 3 directories, one of which is pointing back to another. To see things in more detail, we can use the
ls command:$ ls one/ three@ two/ Notice the
@ symbol? That indicates that the file is a symbolic link!For even greater detail, we can pass in the
-l argument and see where the symbolic link is actually pointed:$ ls -l total 0 drwxr-xr-x 2 josh josh 60 Sep 13 17:18 one/ lrwxrwxrwx 1 josh josh 3 Sep 13 17:34 three -> one/ drwxr-xr-x 2 josh josh 60 Sep 13 17:18 two/ As expected, the
three link is pointed to the one directory.Symbolic links can also contain symbolic links, so we could go ahead and link the
one.txt file from three to the two directory:$ ln -s three/one.txt two/one.txt We should now have a file named
one.txt inside of the two directory. Depending on your terminal configuration, this file very well may be blinking red.Even though the symbolic link was created, the way we specified the path was relative and thus, the link is broken because the
two directory doesn’t contain a three directory with the one.txt file in it.Fortunately, we can remedy this situation but telling
ln to create the symbolic link relative to the link location using the -r or --relative argument.Not so fast though, because the symbolic link already exists, we can’t overwrite it without passing in the
-f or --force argument as well:$ ln -srf three/one.txt two/one.txt Great! We now have
two/one.txt which was linked to three/one.txt which is a link to one/one.txt.Phew, what a mouthful.
Funny enough, your file system thinks it’s a mouthful as well. When we run
tree, the link target being shown is actually that of our original location and not to the link itself:$ tree . ├── one │ └── one.txt ├── three -> one └── two ├── one.txt -> ../one/one.txt └── two.txt 3 directories, 3 files Now that things are linked up nice, we can really see how symbolic links work by messing with the file contents.
Here’s what all of our
one.txt files look like right now:$ cat {one,two,three}/one.txt one one one And if we were to update the contents of the original file and check again:
$ echo "1. One" > one/one.txt $ cat {one,two,three}/one.txt 1. One 1. One 1. One Or even if we changed the contents via one of the symbolic links:
$ echo "One and done" > three/one.txt $ cat {one,two,three}/one.txt One and done One and done One and done Because symbolic links are simply pointers to files, any change we make, to the original file or the symbolic links will be immediately reflected in the original file or any symbolic links to the file.
Conclusion I hope you enjoyed this introduction to symbolic links. I do want to leave you with one word of caution though.
While linking is pretty great, and can make your life a ton easier, keep in mind that if you were to move or delete the original file or directory, all of your existing symbolic links pointed to it will become broken. There’s no automatic updating in that scenario.
Hopefully this small short coming doesn’t scare you off from using this powerful command-line functionality!