On Wed, 1 Nov 2023 18:53:42 +1300, I wrote:
Instead, a simpler way is to use “ln -rs” ...
I discovered a little snag in this. Consider the following sequence: mkdir dir1 dir2 dir3 touch dir1/file ln -rs dir1/file dir2/file ls -l dir2 The output looks like lrwxrwxrwx 1 ldo users 12 Jan 23 16:38 file -> ../dir1/file So far, so good. Next, I try ln -rs dir2/file dir3/file ls -l dir3 I expect the output to look like lrwxrwxrwx 1 ldo users 12 Jan 23 16:38 file -> ../dir2/file Instead, I get lrwxrwxrwx 1 ldo users 12 Jan 23 16:38 file -> ../dir1/file That is to say, ln has first automatically dereferenced the source filename symlink, and then created a symlink to the original item. And there seems to be no option to turn this off. If I avoid the -r option altogether, and do things the old-fashioned way, cd-ing into the destination directory so I can directly specify the symlink as a relative path: (cd dir3; ln -s ../dir2/file file) Then I do indeed get the result I expect: ls -l dir3 producing output lrwxrwxrwx 1 ldo users 12 Jan 23 16:47 file -> ../dir2/file Why is this important? Let’s just say it screwed up the SSL cert config on a webserver, where my symlinks to what were supposed to be the *current* certs ended up pointing to *expired* versions from some prior point in time ...