[colug-432] Links

[Steve VanSlyck]

The links were built by shell commands. THe reference to windows was 
simply to give a metaphore about the moving around ability.

On 2/3/2013 15.21, Rick Hornsby wrote:
>
> On Feb 3, 2013, at 12:07 , Steve VanSlyck <s.vanslyck at spamcop.net 
> <mailto:s.vanslyck at spamcop.net>> wrote:
>
>> Can I cut and paste symlinks from a directory to one its 
>> subdurectories and they will still work?
>>
> That depends on how the symlink was constructed, and if your window 
> manager understands how to deal with symlinks.  Most do, but I'm not 
> sure if any of them will rewrite the link if you try to move it.  Most 
> of my Linux work over the last few years has been focused on the 
> server side with no window managers in sight, so I'm not sure what 
> progress or changes may have come about.
>
> To the symlinks themselves:
>
> Moving a relative link, foo to bar aka foo -> bar, would not work 
> unless you moved both foo and bar to the same place.  That 
> construction is fairly common, and expects the files to stay in the 
> same directory.
>
> Moving an absolute link, foo to /usr/local/lib/bar should work fine. 
>  However, relative links can get more complicated than that, ie foo -> 
> ../../bar would break if you moved foo, because you've changed the 
> context that foo lives in, to where it is going up two directories 
> looking for bar, when it should be (for example) three.
>
> I would recommend that instead of futzing with the window manager, if 
> you want to move a symlink, do it from a shell by removing the old 
> symlink and creating the new one.
>
> If you have a symlink /path/to/my_cool_app -> 
> /home/steveo/projects/my_cool_app, you'd want to
>
> rm -i /path/to/my_cool_app; ln -s /home/steveo/projects/my_cool_app 
> /path/to/new/symlink
>
> (I always have to remind myself that a symlink is target, link.)
>
> Check out the man page for ln(1).
>>
>>  Just like with windows?
>>
> Windows has no concept of symlinks*, which has over the years caused 
> me no end of headaches.  Windows has shortcuts, which are an entirely 
> different thing and a poor excuse for something useful.  Shortcuts are 
> actual files that contain the metadata needed to locate the target, 
> usually using an absolute path.  That's why it seems that moving them 
> around works without any problems.  Most of the time I found that the 
> only thing which could understand shortcuts was Windows itself.  Very 
> few applications could follow the shortcut to the target.
>
> However, if you've ever tried to use a shortcut from the command line, 
> you can't.  Because it isn't a symlink.  It is simply a .lnk file that 
> the Microsoft Windows window manager (Explorer) knows how to deal with.
>
> A symlink is fundamentally built into the various *nix filesystems, 
> and to most applications, indistinguishable from the target 
> file/directory unless said app is checking to see if what they're 
> looking at is a symlink.
>
> -rick
>
>
> * That's not 100% true.  At some point, Microsoft introduced the 
> concept of file "junctions" into NTFS which were a half-assed attempt 
> to imitate the behavior of symlinks.  From what I remember, it was 
> poorly documented, hardly anyone knew they existed (not well 
> published), and they only worked from the command line though I could 
> be wrong about that.
>
>
>
>
>
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