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Aliases and Unix
Authored by: Kool on Oct 15, '01 06:54:12AM

Found it:

ln -s LinkedDirectory Alias

The LinkedDirectory should exist, the Alias not. The -s option is the key to my solution.

Johan



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Aliases and Unix
Authored by: reverie on Nov 03, '01 11:32:30PM

Actually, you should almost always use symbolic links (the -s option) for creating links. I'm not quite clear on why that isn't the default. A symbolic link is a special kind of file that contains the path to the file you want (you can't view the contents of the file directly, you just have to trust me), and when the original file gets moved or deleted, the symbolic link breaks. A "hard" link (the default kind) creates a pointer to the data contained in the original file, and so when you delete the original, the data is still accessible from the new link.

It's kinda hard to think about unless you know the internal workings of a unix filesystem, but in general, aliases are better than links because they have the properties that you only have to delete the original file to delete the data, and the link will remember where the file is if it gets moved to another location.



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