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symbolic-links.md

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Goal

Creating a symbolic link for an executable file in the /usr/local/bin folder is a common way to make a program or script accessible system-wide
Symbolic links allow you to run the program from anywhere in the terminal without specifying its full path
Here's how you can create a symbolic link for an executable file:

Workflow

One By One

  1. Move FIRST to the directory where you need the symbolic links (your destination folder)
  2. Locate the Executable File: Make sure you know the full path to the executable file you want to create a symbolic link for. For this example, let's assume your executable file is located at /path/to/your/executable.
  3. Create the Symbolic Link: Use the ln command with the -s option to create a symbolic link. The general syntax is:
ln -s /path/to/your/executable /usr/local/bin/linkname # original folder => destination folder

Replace **/path/to/your/executable **with the actual path to your executable file and linkname with the desired name of the symbolic link
(the name you'll use to run the program).

For example, if your executable is called myprogram and you want to create a symbolic link called mylink, you can run:

ln -s /path/to/your/executable /usr/local/bin/mylink
  1. Verify the Symbolic Link: You can verify that the symbolic link has been created successfully by using the ls command with the -l option to list the contents of the /usr/local/bin directory:
ls -l /usr/local/bin
  1. Test the Symbolic Link: You can now run your program using the symbolic link name (in this case,mylink) from any directory in your terminal:
mylink

This will execute the original executable file located at /path/to/your/executable.

All at once

If you want to create symbolic links for all executable files in one folder to another with designated link names
you can achieve it in a single command using a combination of find, xargs, and ln. Here's how you can do it:

find /path/to/source_folder -type f -executable -exec sh -c 'ln -s "$0" "/path/to/destination_folder/$(basename "$0")_link"' {} \;

  1. find /path/to/source_folder -type f -executable: This part of the command uses the find command to locate all executable files (-type f -executable) within the specified source folder (/path/to/source_folder).

  2. -exec sh -c 'ln -s "$0" "/usr/local/bin/$(basename "$0")_link"' {} ;: For each executable file found this part of the command runs the ln -s command to create a symbolic link in the /path/to/destination_folder/ directory with a designated link name.

    • sh -c 'ln -s "$0" "/usr/local/bin/$(basename "$0")_link"' {} is a shell command that takes the found executable file ({}) and uses it to create a symbolic link with the desired link name.
    • basename "$0" extracts the filename without the path from the executable file.
    • "$(basename "$0")_link" appends "_link" to the filename to create the link name.
    • The symbolic link is created in the /path/to/destination_folder/ directory.

Code

ln -s /path/to/your/executable /usr/local/bin/linkname
find /path/to/source_folder -type f -executable -exec sh -c 'ln -s "$0" "/path/to/destination_folder/$(basename "$0")_link"' {} \;