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Things look quiet here. But I've been doing a lot of blogging at
dan.langille.org because I prefer WordPress now.
Not all my posts there are FreeBSD related.
I am in the midst of migrating The FreeBSD Diary over to WordPress
(and you can read about that here).
Once the migration is completed, I'll move the FreeBSD posts into the
new FreeBSD Diary website.
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Creating a symbolic link
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This article shows you how to create a symbolic link. You might also want to see Linking to other directories with Apache. |
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What is a symbolic link?
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A symbolic link is a way of saving disk space when the same file structure must exist
in two places. It's also a way of creating a short cut to another place. These
shortcuts are used quite often on ftp servers. For example, if you look at your
typical FreeBSD ftp server, you might see something like this:
ftp> cd /pub/FreeBSD
250 CWD command successful.
ftp> ls 3*
227 Entering Passive Mode (203,97,33,7,193,160)
150 Opening ASCII mode data connection for /bin/ls.
lrwxrwxrwx 1 0 1 25 May 9 22:29 3.1-RELEASE -> releases/i386/3.1-RELEASE
lrwxrwxrwx 1 0 1 25 May 9 22:29 3.1-STABLE -> releases/i386/3.1-RELEASE
lrwxrwxrwx 1 0 1 25 May 18 10:03 3.2-RELEASE -> releases/i386/3.2-RELEASE
226 Transfer complete.
You can see that the releases actually exist within a subdirectory. In case, the
links are relative to the current path. |
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/home
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ln for full details. But here are a few practical examples. The
following demonstrates that /home is a shortcut for /usr/home.
# cd /
# ls -ld home
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 9 Jun 20 19:28 home -> /usr/home
This link could be created with:
# ln -s /usr/home /home
In this case the links are absolute, not relative as in the ftp server example. |
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Files
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You can also create a symbolic link with a file. I'll show you some FreeBSD
examples from /dev and in /etc.
# cd /dev
# ls -lt | grep ">"
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 10 Jul 5 11:47 vga -> /dev/ttyv0
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 12 Jun 20 19:15 log -> /var/run/log
lrwxrwxr-x 1 root wheel 5 Jun 20 19:05 wcd0c -> acd0c
lrwxrwxr-x 1 root wheel 6 Jun 20 19:05 rwcd0c -> racd0c
lrwxrwxr-x 1 root wheel 6 Jun 20 19:05 rwcd0a -> racd0a
lrwxrwxr-x 1 root wheel 5 Jun 20 19:05 wcd0a -> acd0a
# cd /etc
# ls -lt | grep ">"
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 23 Jun 20 18:58 termcap ->
/usr/share/misc/termcap
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 13 Jun 20 18:58 rmt -> /usr/sbin/rmt
To create a symbolic link in your home directory from such as the termcap link above,
you could do this:
# ln -s /usr/share/misc/termcap /etc/termcap
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