Symbolic Links in Linux | Use SymLinks for Anything

in this video I'm going over symbolic links in its absolute power that it has they're great for doing a whole variety of thing that I'm going to show you in this video this video is brought to you by purism makers of the leap from five phone get yours today because pre-orders are going up at the end of July and the phone will be releasing in q3 of this year now this video is gonna be based in Linux because that's the operating system I used however please note these same principles apply to Windows instead of using Ln which is what I'm using in Linux you're gonna use MK link in Windows and I've done symbolic links a lot of times in a whole variety of operating systems both Linux in Windows and they're just so fantastic and powerful and I want to show you a couple examples today to get you started both file symbolic links and folder symbolic links for the file I'm gonna move a script into a separate directory and then create a symbolic link to it and for the folder I'm gonna actually move a game from one of my smaller drives to one of my bigger drives and then do a symbolic link on that small drive just so I don't have to change anything in either Lou traceur any of my launchers that reference this game that will automatically redirect without any issue this is extremely powerful especially when moving like a steam library you can move your entire library to a new Drive and just create one symbolic link and everything would be right with the world so with that said let's go ahead and jump on the desktop and get into creating our symbolic links okay so in this video I want to teach you about symbolic links symbolic links are not a Linux only kind of thing Windows has done it it's actually m'kay link is what they use in Windows but for the Linux I like the symbolic links a little bit better because it's just a bit cleaner so what it allows you to do is move things around on your system but leave an old link a symbolic link to where you can easily reference it or better yet let's say you've installed your program and you've run out of space like let's say you have a 50 gig game and you've installed it and everything's pointing to that one location but you need to move you need that 50 gigs for something else well you can actually move that folder over somewhere else and then just create a symbolic link and then next time you launch that game it'll just launched from its new location but the system itself still thinks it's in its old location so with that said let's see here let's take a look at my home directory I see the fixed cam dot Sh now technically I like to have all that and actually script directory so let's go ahead and make a make directory script and we'll move fix ksh over into that hope you look at the listing fixed cam is not there and if we go to script we'll see that it is there so with that let's go ahead and launch fix cam from here using a symbolic link the actual link for the actual creating of the new file will be Ln for the link - s for symbolic and then this you need to actually specify the path name of what you're linking so we're going to do the home directory script and then we'll go ahead and make this fix cam and then that's gonna come back to fix cam SH where we're at now if we do a listing we'll see that we have SH or fixed cam dot SH you see that the colors a little different so if you do a long listing here you'll see that you can actually see the actual link of where this pointing to but we can still actually use this file right here in this directory without any issues so that's linking a file which is pretty awesome and honestly to delete this link we can just do remove fixed cam and if we do our long listing you'll see that the symbolic links there but if we do a LS of script you'll see that fixed cam is in the script directory just fine so pretty cool stuff that's just linking of the actual file now if you're gonna go into actually doing other things like let's go into 256 nvme directory and we'll go over to games now there's a couple games in here and I'm looking through and I'm like okay if I wanted to move one of these games to let's say my 1 terabyte directory in that games I could easily do that and still reference it I could move like let's say I wanted to move dîablø directory over to the home of one TV games and then from here we put be aa blue so we'll move this entire directory over there alright that game is now moved from the 256 nvme drive to the 1 terabyte drive which is a slower drive by considerable margin so with Diablo sitting over there we can now create our link so we'll do Ln for the link - yes for symbolic and then we want the actual destination so that's gonna be our home one TV dr games Diablo now we have that directory we want to create a directory here for it so we'll just make it Diablo /or just Diablo for the directory so now let's do our long listing and you'll see that Diablo is now pointing to the one terabyte now let's go ahead and launch Lou trous and see what happens when we go to Diablo and if we go to configuration here and we go to game options you see that it's pointed to 256 nvme well we've moved it over to the one terabyte drive but what happens when we launch this game let's go ahead and do it and find out pretty cool I moved that entire game to a whole different Drive didn't have to update anything all I did was create that symbolic link gorgeous and there you have it that's symbolic links in a nutshell I absolutely love them I use them all the time one thing I didn't show in this video was actually I use them for creating savestates a lot of times if I'm using multiple computers and playing one game I'll like to actually symbolic link it to my Dropbox and then those save files will just save right in my Dropbox and then when I'm on the other computer I'll do another symbolic link to that Dropbox so anytime any of those computers would reference that game and do any kind of save files it would save it and that one folder sitting there which is pretty awesome if you have next cloud or any other ones like onedrive or Google Drive you can do the exact same thing which is just so great because it just sinks everything for you and then those symbolic links just act as reference points to all your saved games across a whole multitude of computers that you might play it on so that's just one other use case for it and there's a ton of use cases for it in business which I haven't really gone over such as moving programs and applications and those types of things but that just gave you kind of some ideas of the power of symbolic links but let me know your thoughts down below in the comment section and a big shout out to my patrons without you I couldn't make these videos and I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Chris Titus Tech

Views: 35,377

Rating: 4.9281044 out of 5

Keywords: chris titus tech, linux, symbolic links, symbolic link, links, symbolic, hard links, symbolic links in linux, linux tutorial, links in linux, hard vs symbolic links linux, create a symbolic link in linux, hard and soft links in linux, soft and hard links in linux, linux symbolic links explained, symbolic links in telugu, hard and soft links in linux telugu, hard symbolic links in command line

Id: mA08E59-zo8

Length: 8min 19sec (499 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 27 2019