ln -s: from one source to many destinations

Question

Pseudocode

ln -s $HOME/file $HOME/Documents/ $HOME/Desktop/

where I want to create a symlink from the source to two destinations. Probably, moreutils and pee.

How can you create many symlinks from one source?

score 11 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 01 '16 at 21:17

11

You can't do this with a single invocation of ln,but you could loop through all necessary destinations:

$ for i in "$HOME/Documents/" "$HOME/Desktop/"; do ln -s "$HOME/file" "$i"; done

answered Jun 01 '16 at 21:17

Serge

8,541

2

You could omit the quotes if your home base directory does not contain spaces or other characters to be escaped, e.g. punctuation. However, using quotes always where appropriate makes a habit that keeps you from mistakes in other cases where directory/file names could easily contain special chars – Serge Jun 02 '16 at 15:04

score 6 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 01 '16 at 22:10

6

If you have gnu parallel you could try with

parallel ln -s /path/file {} ::: /path/dest1 /path/dest2 /path/dest3

or, to symlink multiple targets to (the same) multiple destinations

parallel ln -s {1} {2} ::: /path/file1 /path/file2 ::: /path/dest1 /path/dest2

answered Jun 01 '16 at 22:10

don_crissti

82,805

2

@Masi Make sure you run the parallel command from the parallel package and not the one from moreutils. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Jun 01 '16 at 22:27

Stephen Kitt · Answer 3 · 2016-06-01T21:28:52.190

It's no less verbose than two separate ln -s invocations:

echo $HOME/Documents/ $HOME/Desktop/ | xargs -n 1 ln -s $HOME/file

but that only works for absolute paths (because symbolic links are interpreted relative to their parent directory, unless they're absolute).

(The relative cost drops of course as the number of links goes up. Also, this snippet relies on the fact that $HOME doesn't contain any spaces, tabs or newlines.)

ln -s: from one source to many destinations

3 Answers3