14h ago

It took me way too long to realize symlinks were a thing and why I couldn't understand my Linux directories

I mean I feel stupid typing it now, but I've been using Windows since I was 5 years old, and Linux for about 30 days. It was not apparent to me that many of my folders were actually shortcuts to stuff in my user directory, and now that I know to look out for them the location of my applications make sooo much more sense.

11 comments

Wait until you learn about hard links
- came here for this
- And bird mounts
  
  Uh I think you meant bind mounts lol

Don't feel dumb! This is just normal learning!
Symlinks are possible in Windows (at least in NTFS filesystems) but to my knowledge they aren't used by anything official.
Windows's weird "psuedo folders" thing it does with "Documents" etc is something else entirely.
- Adding on to Windows: There's no way (in the UI) to add symlinks. In Windows 10, symlinks must be created in an administrative command prompt. It is pretty damn clunky.

protip: put bind -s 'set mark-symlinked-directories on' in your ~/.bashrc and also bind -s 'set completion-ignore-case on' because why not :)

Hey no worries, we all start somewhere.
Now that you know about symlinks, you can get creative with them: https://sparkventure.net/the-versatility-of-symbolic-links-in-linux-a-guide-with-examples/
The hard part now is to avoid overdoing it: https://www.ceos3c.com/linux/understanding-linux-symbolic-links-a-beginners-guide/#best-practices-and-common-pitfalls
- That beginners guide says to avoid creating circular symlinks. What if, entirely hypothetically, I already have a circular symlink?
- "Overdoing it" doesn't exist when you understand what it can accomplish. Bedrock Linux for example is based on symlink abuse from what I understand
  
  I'll have to look into that distro later. Anything particularly noteworthy about it, besides the symlink abuse?
  Edit: I did some rudimentary searching, apparently it's a meta distro that let's you mix and match stuff from multiple linux distros: https://bedrocklinux.org/
  That's actually pretty wild. I might play around with this in the future

11 comments