Questions tagged [symlink]
symbolic link, a type of file that is a reference to another file or folder
187
questions
1
vote
0answers
77 views
Mailbox set as read-only when symlinking from an external storage
I have multiple mailboxes and I want to save space by moving some of them in an external storage. I'd like to still be able to view the email using Mail.app even if said mailbox is now located in an ...
0
votes
1answer
28 views
Any better way to move app library path to external drive than using symbolic link?
I am running MacOS 10.14.5. I used symbolic links a lot to free up my internal drive. My internal drive is almost full and I need to free up some spaces again. Normally, the symbolic links solution ...
1
vote
1answer
63 views
MacOS Mail cannot access folders on external drive via symlinks
My 2012 Mac Mini is running High Sierra, and I have copied older mail folders to a partition of an external drive. In the User mail folder, I then placed symlinks. In Finder, the symlinks show the ...
0
votes
0answers
12 views
How to selectively remove sym-linked files from a certain directly
In /usr/local/include , symlinked files from ../Cellar/ and /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX.sdk/usr/include/ as follows;
rwxr-xr-x 1 user admin 48B May 29 2018 unitypes.h -&...
1
vote
3answers
79 views
Symlinked Dotfiles Are Not Working
I'm on macOS Catalina and I'm trying to move all my "dotfiles" into a folder, where I can place them under version control, then symlink them back into the home folder. I've created a hidden "....
1
vote
0answers
50 views
Creating link to a remote directory
In macOS Catalina the System volume has been made read-only. For my work, I have to mount a remote folder at /, so it is reachable as cd /TestFolder. Until now I used to do the following:
Mount the ...
0
votes
2answers
21 views
Organizing Favourites in Finder with Symlinks and colons
On my machine I have repeating patterns of directories.
E.g,:
notes/2019-01
records/expenses/2019-01
records/taxes/2019-01
customer/project/notes/2019-01
Links in the Favourites bar show up as:
...
2
votes
2answers
133 views
Copy directory structure and symlink files (alternative to `cp -as`)
I'm looking for how to recursively copy a directory structure and then fill the copy with symlinks to the corresponding files from the source directory. This has a simple solution in Linux in the form ...
0
votes
1answer
27 views
Unexpected behavior of bash script used to sync dotfiles
I'm using essentially this script for keeping my dotfiles under version control. I recently added a snippets folder inside my emacs.d directory and listed it as one of the things that should be ...
0
votes
1answer
58 views
Why is ~/Documents a symlink to itself, and how should this be fixed?
I'm a programmer diagnosing a customer's issue with our software. We're having some problems writing into the user's Documents folder in macOS Mojave 10.14.6.*
It turns out that the customer's ~/...
0
votes
0answers
13 views
Does Spotlight index the contents of symlinks?
From what I can tell, Finder searches do not follow symlinks. Is this expected behavior? I can't find it documented anywhere.
Background:
I've been syncing some PDFs using Dropbox (location A), but ...
7
votes
3answers
2k views
Relocating /Users folder in MacOS 10.15 (Catalina)?
In the past when we wanted to offload the /Users folder from the internal disk we simply created a symbolic link for /Users that pointed to /Volumes/External_Drive_Name/Users. The Mac in question is a ...
2
votes
1answer
85 views
Permission denied for ls -l in a folder with symlinks
I have a folder hierarchy
parent_folder -> inner_folder -> innermost_folder
The steps I followed are (as a sudo user):
created a symlink pointing to parent_folder
set the permissions of the ...
1
vote
1answer
21 views
Turning on FileVault with a symlinked directory
Running Mojave (10.14.6). There's not enough room on my SSD for my Music, Pictures, and Movies. I have those on an external drive. I have not yet turned on FileVault. If I create symlinks for those ...
2
votes
1answer
93 views
On Catalina, what should /private/tmp look like?
This is my /tmp and /private:
# ls -lA /tmp /private/
lrwxr-xr-x@ 1 root admin 11 Oct 18 18:48 /tmp -> private/tmp
/private/:
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 121 root wheel 3872 Oct 21 13:27 etc
drwxr-xr-...
2
votes
2answers
52 views
How to remove symlinks created after a specific date?
Say I did a
ln -s /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/SDKs/MacOSX.sdk/usr/include/* /usr/local/include/
Now I regret it. How can I delete all these links? The good news is I created them today, so ...
0
votes
0answers
429 views
ld: library not found for -lSystem
New to Mac. I am going to install a software and running make, returns the error:
$ make
gcc -I/Users/username/softwarename/include -I/opt/local/include/glib-2.0 -I/opt/local/lib/glib-2.0/include -I/...
1
vote
0answers
29 views
After upgrade to 10.15 Cataline /media folder is gone
Previously I had used /media to mount remote filesystems.. after upgrading today I find that the directory is gone and / is read only. Is there a workaround for this? The filesystem I had mounted ...
0
votes
0answers
27 views
Symlink works differently on macOS than in linux
I have recently begun to work with Apple laptops and macOS. I wrote a script that symlinks my files and configs, and it works for my linux laptop.
However, something went wrong in macOS.
I narrowed ...
5
votes
2answers
1k views
Sync Desktop now that Dropbox no longer supports symlinks
How can I have my Desktop sync over Dropbox?
Previously, I used symlinks to have Dropbox sync the Desktop and Documents folders while keeping them in their actual locations. Dropbox no longer ...
1
vote
2answers
60 views
How can I change the default Documents and Pictures directories to symlinks?
I have most of my important files under Dropbox, like Pictures and Documents. It would be great if I could set the default Documents and Pictures directories to either point under the respective ...
1
vote
1answer
58 views
Symlinks became files, containing relative paths, within an app bundle, why? How to fix?
I discovered an interesting form of corruption within some application bundles which had been stored on a file server for months and years.
The application bundles were installers for various macOS ...
1
vote
0answers
24 views
How to move Photos Library and associated iPhotos Library to another drive without breaking links?
I wish to move my Photos Library to a secondary drive, both formatted with APFS. I still have the iPhotos Library from where the pictures were imported.
I'm concerned that when moving the Photos and ...
1
vote
0answers
276 views
Network drive in finder sidebar disappears, is there's a way keep them in unmounted state?
I use Automator to mount my network drives on boot by following instructions from this link:
http://osxdaily.com/2012/05/04/automatically-connect-to-network-drive-mac-os-x/
and then drag the drives ...
0
votes
1answer
100 views
Show original shortcut in MacOS 10.14
I often make symbolic links of folders. I recently had to change my laptop and move from Sierra to Mojave.
In the old OS I used to type Cmd + R to go to the original folder. This seems to no longer ...
3
votes
3answers
217 views
Why have symbolic links between files in folders at same depth?
I noticed that in macOS, the /usr/local/Cellar folder contains binaries installed using Homebrew, and that /usr/local/opt has symbolic links to a bunch of those binaries. I haven't used symbolic links ...
2
votes
1answer
1k views
Adding symlink to /usr/bin
I'm trying to add python3 to my path by adding a symlink but it's erroring and I'm not sure why.
/usr/bin $ sudo su
sh-3.2# ln -s /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/bin/python3 /usr/...
2
votes
0answers
733 views
MacOS Mojave: How do I change the default /Users directory for ALL users logging in?
I've seen this question answered in various forms for other iterations of Mac OS X, but Mojave is proving a bit more challenging. In short:
I have several dual drive systems, (SSD and HDD) with the ...
1
vote
0answers
412 views
How to sync only Masters folder of Photos library to OneDrive
I manage my picture library in Photos, the size of which is currently about 120 GB. For backup and to have online access to all my pictures I would like to sync the library with the cloud. However, I ...
6
votes
1answer
1k views
Best practices to move macOS Mail.app storage to an external drive?
I have a system with fairly small internal storage (500GB) so I have attached a reasonably quick external storage device (256GB) that will be constantly mounted. To free up space on the internal ...
1
vote
0answers
181 views
How to move shared albums data from Photos externally
I recently moved my Photos library to an external SSD. Unfortunately shared album data still lives locally inside ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.cloudphotosd/Data/Library/Application Support/com.apple....
-2
votes
1answer
271 views
How to get xcode simulator working after moving Library/Developer to an external harddrive
How do I get device simulator working in xcode after moving the Library/Developer file to an external hard drive and symlinking it. Yes, I've already symlinked the files from Developer.
2
votes
2answers
473 views
How does macOS implement symbolic link in Mojave on FAT32 filesystems?
I remember in the past, not all types of aliases (as in the macOS feature) can be created on all filesystems. This is because symbolic link (as in the type of file) is a special Unix file type, ...
1
vote
1answer
26 views
Create an hardlink across storage device (or alternative solutions)
I have named my secondary SSD with a name with a space in it - "My SSD", and have been using it for many years with multimedia applications without any problem. Part of my media library with thousands ...
2
votes
0answers
60 views
Automator service to create Dropbox symlink
I'm trying to create an Automator service(in the right click menu) that creates a symlink of the folder/file and moves it to the Dropbox folder. This is what I have right now:
while [ $# -ne 0 ]; do
...
1
vote
1answer
674 views
Which filesystems support symbolic links?
I'm copying a big archive of files from a Linux host to an external USB hard drive, that will then plug into a macOS host. The copy should preserve the archive's many symbolic links (ln -s). What ...
3
votes
3answers
203 views
How to work with 2 Applications folders?
I have an internal 250 GB SSD. this drive was filling up and I bought an external 4 TB external hard drive. My Applications folder on my SSD was taking up a lot of space so I decided to create an ...
1
vote
2answers
2k views
Why does my symbolic link not work?
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 ...
1
vote
1answer
108 views
Symlink dotfiles to Documents/Dotfiles
I have a setup script which creates links between my dotfiles repo and the files at the root of my Home directory. Generally speaking, the process looks like this for each file:
ln -s ~/Documents/...
1
vote
0answers
103 views
Symbolic link in High Sierra breaks when the file is modified
I have a file named file.ext. I create an symbolic link to this file named file_symlink.ext in other folder.
When I modify file.ext directly (without opening the file via the symbolic link), the ...
-1
votes
1answer
60 views
Latest file for download
I want to be able to have a generic link to the latest version on of file available for download to make things easier for clients.
Example: http://server.web.net/Adium/Adium-1.5.10.4.pkg
If it could ...
1
vote
1answer
217 views
After upgrading weechat using Homebrew, brew says formula built but weechat was not symlinked
I installed weechat 1.9(an IRC client) with brew a long time ago. Today I was trying to update the program to the latest version with 'brew upgrade weechat'. The whole upgrading process was successful,...
0
votes
1answer
42 views
Back up only actual files in directory structure
I want to backup my savegames:
+ /Library/Containers/com.doublefine.dfaosx/***
+ /Library/Containers/com.doublefine.dottosx/***
I initially wanted to do this as part of a larger rsync backup. ...
2
votes
0answers
457 views
SMB protocol supports remote hard links but mount_smbfs(8) doesn't?
I've been using the excellent Link Shell Extension tool on Windows 7 to create hard links remotely to files on the same mounted volume on a Windows Server 2008 R2 drive [not symlinks — I included this ...
4
votes
2answers
1k views
symbolic link vs. alias
Disclaimer: I work with programmers, but am not one myself and have no real / formal knowledge of how an OS works; please be patient if the following makes plain my ignorance :)
I am trying to ...
4
votes
4answers
6k views
Hard links on High Sierra
I have been using hard links, as described here, for linking my important folders to my Dropbox. A very useful trick for backing up without messing up your preferred directory structure.
After my ...
2
votes
1answer
181 views
Logic Pro X Keyshortcut settings - can they be saved to iCloud Drive?
how do I make sure that the Logic Pro X Keyshortcut settings are somehow fetched from the iCloud Drive every time?
I keep switching from machine1 to machine2 to machine3 and I think I've had to keep ...
1
vote
1answer
64 views
How to restore a Time Machine backup from a 2 HDD setup to a single HDD
My current (being phased out) setup on my iMac is SSD contains OS, HDD contains my home folder.
/Volumes/iMacSSD/ is the OS
/Volumes/iMacSSD/Users/iMac or /Users/iMac is a symlink to /Volumes/iMacHDD/...
1
vote
2answers
93 views
How do `stat` and `file` differentiate symlinks?
I was doing my routine work today and it seems the stat and file commands in the terminal don‘t show if a file is a symbolic link:
flow2k@myPad:dir ln -s aa.iml superlink
flow2k@myPad:dir stat ...
2
votes
1answer
54 views
How to delete a folder that has 65535 links on it?
Somehow a folder from /var/folders (/var/folders/2j/8_50ggln3wz21k4gmfx86drh0000gn/T/ on my machine) got 65535 links to it. This caused my machine to not boot anymore.
I managed to fix the booting ...
