It took me way too long to realize symlinks were a thing and why I couldn't understand my Linux directories
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.
There are some really old introductory unix texts of how the system is structured and why, 99% of this stuff is still true for most linux (except some weird experimental alternatives where people tried to create ms-unix ). The basic terminal commands should also be useful, and help you understand. For example open a terminal and see the command for copy (cp) or (mv) or mkdir rm rmdir and use -h for the help of the options of each (if -h doesn't work then --help does) and then extensive documentation is found by name of command after "man" for manual ex: man chmod
One of the most magical things that happens in unix is mount, where you create a directory (mount point /mnt), take a device like your usb stick volume named sdb1
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt
ls -lah /mnt
say you create /tmp/disks and in it a b c d e and mount 5 disks in a through e and it appears as one subdirectory /tmp/disks
Instead of looking at a file browser and something going cling-clong and appearing as a volume, what dumb people do
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.
I just assumed they were the same as "shortcuts" on Windows, coz to the end user they're not all that different - File that points you to a different file or directory when you open it
I think ntfs does some weird shit with translating names of files in different languages too, and maybe they are simlinks
Say desktop is translated to ntesctop in some language, the real file is still desktop but there is a link as ntesctop --> desktop so without changing the system it flips from one language to another. I am not sure, I haven't really spent much time on it, in recent years I did some installations at work but never got to play with it much.
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.
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?
Delete one
"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
protip: put
bind -s 'set mark-symlinked-directories on'in your ~/.bashrc and alsobind -s 'set completion-ignore-case on'because why not :)