Question

Wow, I’ve never really used symlinks that much before, but this is really boggling:

bash-3.2$ echo "weird" > original.txt
bash-3.2$ mkdir originals
bash-3.2$ mv original.txt originals/
bash-3.2$ cat originals/original.txt 
weird
bash-3.2$ mkdir copies
bash-3.2$ ln -s originals/original.txt copies/copy.txt
bash-3.2$ cat copies/copy.txt 
cat: copies/copy.txt: No such file or directory
bash-3.2$ ls copies/copy.txt 
copies/copy.txt
bash-3.2$ ls -l copies/copy.txt 
lrwxr-xr-x  1 zach  staff  22 Dec 22 01:23 copies/copy.txt -> originals/original.txt
bash-3.2$ cat originals/original.txt 
weird
bash-3.2$ cat copies/copy.txt 
cat: copies/copy.txt: No such file or directory
bash-3.2$ cd copies/
bash-3.2$ cat copy.txt 
cat: copy.txt: No such file or directory

Why can’t I cat the symlink in the copies directory?

If I make the symlink from inside the copies/, I can cat it just fine. If I make the symlink in the current directory, I can also cat it just fine. If I make the symlink in the current directory and then move it to copies/, I get “copies/copy.txt: No such file or directory”.

Answer 1

If you create a relative path to a symbolic link, it will store it as a relative symbolic link. Symbolic links are relative to the location the link is in, not the location where it was created or opened.

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Please use absolute path or path relative to the link.

Change:

ln -s originals/original.txt copies/copy.txt

To:

# absolute
ln -s /path/to/originals/original.txt copies/copy.txt

# relative
cd copies
ln -s ../originals/original.txt copy.txt