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Dr I
Asked: 2012-10-10 02:10:16 +0800 CST

Massive symbolic link creation using for loop in bash

  • 772

I just wondering myself if it would be possible to create massive amount of symbolic links using a for loop?

For exemple, I have a lot of directory on my /tmp directory (I know, not recommanded) and I do not want to move them out.

Instead I just want to have them on my root directory using symbolic links.

Here is what I did, but unfortunatly, do not work at all:

for directories in /tmp/; do ln -s /tmp/$directories /$directories; done

So if someone could bring me a hint, it would be wonderfull ;-) Thanks.

linux

5 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Try this.

    cd /tmp && for i in `ls `; do ln -s $i /$i; done
    • 3 
  2. for directories in `find /tmp/ -type d`
do
  ln -s /tmp/$directories /$directories;
done
    • 1

  3. Following block will create links as you explained.

    If you want to filter out some names from /tmp ; use -name switch for find.

    If you want greater depth symlinked adjust/remove -maxdepth switch

    cd / 
find /tmp/ -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec ln -s {} \;

    To make these links you need write permissions on /

    • 1

  4. Ok, so, Job done thanks to everyone for your hints.

    Here is my simple solution:

     for i in $(ls); do dir=$i; ln -s /tmp/$dir /$dir; done

    Et voila :D

    Thank you, StackExchange community once again ;-)

    • 1

  5. You need to have write permissions to the directory where you want the symbolic link to be created. Bear in mind that /tmp is (usually) cleaned up at boot and may be cleaned periodically throughout the machine's uptime, so relying on things being around persistently in /tmp will bite you, sooner or later.

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