Why does my symbolic link not work?

Question

I wrote a small Julia program:

println("Hello world!")

I can run Julia from the Terminal:

$ /Applications/Julia-0.6.app/Contents/Resources/julia/bin/julia test.jl 
Hello world!

To make my life easier, I tried to create a symbolic link to the julia file. However, it doesn't seem to work!

$ sudo ln -s /Applications/Julia-0.6.app/Contents/Resources/bin/julia /usr/local/bin/julia
$ julia
-bash: julia: command not found
$ type -a julia
-bash: type: julia: not found

How do I get my symbolic link to work properly?

What is confusing for me is that /usr/local/bin/ is in my PATH:

$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/Library/TeX/texbin:/opt/X11/bin

Answer 1

I figured out what went wrong: I made a typographical mistake when I was creating the symbolic link!

WRONG

sudo ln -s /Applications/Julia-0.6.app/Contents/Resources/bin/julia /usr/local/bin/julia

CORRECT

sudo ln -s /Applications/Julia-0.6.app/Contents/Resources/julia/bin/julia /usr/local/bin/julia

(I was missing the julia in .../Resources/julia/bin/...)

Answer 2

It's a better idea to add the folder that contains the binary to your $PATH instead of creating a link to the file inside /usr/local/bin.

export PATH="${PATH}:/Applications/Julia-0.6.app/Contents/Resources/julia/bin"

This way, you don't need to create invidual links for every single file inside the bin folder if you ever want to use them.

You can also add this line to ~/.bash_profile for it to persist after you close the terminal.