I mean I feel stupid typing it now, but I’ve been using Windows since I was 5 years old, and Linux for about 30 days. It was not apparent to me that many of my folders were actually shortcuts to stuff in my user directory, and now that I know to look out for them the location of my applications make sooo much more sense. I just sorta jumped into linux and googled problems as they arose, but now I’m thinking I need to read a book on this or something lol
Wait until you learn about hard links
And bird mounts
Uh I think you meant bind mounts lol
Stupid autocorrect!
Err… I mean uhh… No, I mean bird mounts! Don’t you like mounting birds in your filesystem?
They might have but I certainly don’t
He said BIRD mounts and he meant it. It is up to us to rise to the level where we too can use bird mounts.
protip: put
bind -s 'set mark-symlinked-directories on'in your ~/.bashrc and alsobind -s 'set completion-ignore-case on'because why not :)Don’t feel dumb! This is just normal learning!
Symlinks are possible in Windows (at least in NTFS filesystems) but to my knowledge they aren’t used by anything official.
Windows’s weird “psuedo folders” thing it does with “Documents” etc is something else entirely.
I just assumed they were the same as “shortcuts” on Windows, coz to the end user they’re not all that different - File that points you to a different file or directory when you open it
Adding on to Windows: There’s no way (in the UI) to add symlinks. In Windows 10, symlinks must be created in an administrative command prompt. It is pretty damn clunky.
Hey no worries, we all start somewhere.
Now that you know about symlinks, you can get creative with them: https://sparkventure.net/the-versatility-of-symbolic-links-in-linux-a-guide-with-examples/
The hard part now is to avoid overdoing it: https://www.ceos3c.com/linux/understanding-linux-symbolic-links-a-beginners-guide/#best-practices-and-common-pitfalls
That beginners guide says to avoid creating circular symlinks. What if, entirely hypothetically, I already have a circular symlink?
“Overdoing it” doesn’t exist when you understand what it can accomplish. Bedrock Linux for example is based on symlink abuse from what I understand
I’ll have to look into that distro later. Anything particularly noteworthy about it, besides the symlink abuse?
Edit: I did some rudimentary searching, apparently it’s a meta distro that let’s you mix and match stuff from multiple linux distros: https://bedrocklinux.org/
That’s actually pretty wild. I might play around with this in the future
