Directory link

Hello,

I'm trying to create a link to a directory. I have looked @ the man pages but no joy.

pwd
/usr/local/www/data/

ln -fh testarea /home/user/testarea
link: testarea: Is a directory


with
in -fhs testarea /home/user/testarea

that seems to work but when I access the link I run into this error

/home/user/testarea: Too many levels of symbolic links.

Thanks in advance!

Wait, you're creating the link _to_ the directory? You've got your arguments backwards. ("ln creates a link to an existing file source_file. If target_file is given, the link has that name ....")

The man page is confusing as hell. "target_file" and "target_directory" should be replaced throughout with "link_name" or some such.

Regarding the first error you were getting, directories cannot be hard linked, only symbolically linked.

K.C.

Thank you for your reply.

So how would I go about creating a link to a directory?

One would create a link to a directory like this :

ln -s /path/to/realdir [name_of_link]

The name of the link is optional; without it the link name will be the same as the "source" file or directory. In this case, "realdir".

So, in your case, the following should be sufficient (if I am guessing your intentions correctly) :

cd /usr/local/www/data/
ln -s /home/user/testarea

... which would leave you with a link in /usr/local/www/data/ that looks like a subdirectory named testarea and points to the actual subdirectory /home/user/testarea .

K.C.

That did it..... thanks!

Only 2 and half years late

But still a solution.

I wanted the directory linking from a location to a users ftp home folder, but using symlink the links were not available in ftp, whether this was the ftp server hidding them or not I'm not sure.

But found a nice method using the mount command, this allowed me to create a link between the destination and was also available in FTP clients.

mount --bind <DESTINATION> <NEW FOLDER>

This is only available till next restart, to have the mounted directory available after restart, add the following line to your /etc/fstab file

<DESTINATION> <NEW FOLDER> none bind