If successful, you should see it in the home directory. ln -s /Users/jessicawilkins/Music ~/my_music You can then use the ln command to create a symlink to the Music directory. You can run cd to get back to your home directory in the command line. In this example, we want to create a symbolic link called my_music that will point to my Music folder in the home directory of my computer.įirst, make sure you are in the home directory. How to create a symbolic link to a directory You should also see that new symbolic link show up in your directory. The fcc_link.txt -> example_fcc_file.txt portion of the output shows you that the symbolic link is pointing to the file called example_fcc_file.txt. lrwxr-xr-x 1 jessicawilkins staff 20 Feb 19 19:56 fcc_link.txt -> example_fcc_file.txt When you run that command, you should see this type of result in the terminal. The ls command will list information about files and the -l flag represents the symbolic link. To check that your symbolic link was successful, you can use the ls command. Desktop % ln -s example_fcc_file.txt Desktop % That is because when the ln command is successful, there will be no output and it will return zero. When you run that command in the terminal, you will notice that nothing was returned. I can then use the ln command to create a new symbolic link called fcc_link.txt. I can run the command cd Desktop to navigate to my Desktop.Īfter running that command, you should see you are now in the Desktop. I will need to first open up my terminal, and then make sure I am in the Desktop directory. On my Desktop I have a file called example_fcc_file.txt. Let's take a look at an example to better understand how this works. If omitted, then the system will create a new link for you in the current directory you are in. The optional_symbolic_link parameter is the name of the symbolic link you want to create. The existing_source_file represents the file on your computer that you want to create the symbolic link for. If you omit the -s option, then a hard link will be created instead. You use the ln command to create the links for the files and the -s option to specify that this will be a symbolic link. ln -s existing_source_file optional_symbolic_link Here is the basic syntax for creating a symlink to a file in your terminal. You can find the command line using the Terminal application on Mac or using the Command Prompt on Windows. Soft links can point to other files or directories on a different file system, whereas hard links cannot. A hard link will create a copy of the file. What is the difference between soft and hard links in Linux?Ī soft link or symbolic link will point to the original file on your system. In this article, I will go over how to use the ln command to create a symlink to a file or directory. Symbolic links are useful because they act as shortcuts to a file or directory. ![]() ![]() You can create a symlink (symbolic) by using the ln command in the command line. A symlink (symbolic) is a type of file that points to other files or directories (folders) in Linux.
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