ln

The ln command is a standard Unix command utility used to create a hard link or a symbolic link to an existing file. The use of a hard link allows multiple filenames to be associated with the same file since a hard link points to the inode of a given file, the data of which is stored on disk. On the other hand, symbolic links are special files that refer to other files by name.

• GNU Coreutils Project Homepage [EN]

• GNU Coreutils [EN] @ Fedora Package
• GNU Coreutils [EN] @ Homebrew Formula

• ln [EN] @ Wikipedia
• ln [DE] @ Wikipedia

Documentation

• ln [EN] @ GNU Coreutils Manual

• man 1 'ln' [EN]

Syntax

ln [PARAMETER ...] TARGET [LINK]

Parameters

-f, --force

Remove existing destination files.

-r, --relative

Make symbolic links relative to the link location.

-s, --symbolic

Make symbolic links instead of hard links.

-t DIRECTORY, --target-directory=DIRECTORY

Specify the destination DIRECTORY.

-T, --no-target-directory

Do not treat the last operand specially when it is a directory or a symbolic link to a directory.

Examples

Link all Shell files to ~/bin

find "${HOME}/dev" -type 'f' -iname '*.sh' \
  -exec ln --symbolic --force --target-directory="${HOME}/bin" '{}' ';'