create a minimal symlink

Question

I'm looking for an (preferably portable) way to create 'short' relative symbolic links. That is for two absolute file names target and name I want to find an equivalent and short relative file name reltarget such that after

ln -s $target $name

name points to the same location as after

ln -s $reltarget $name

.

Some examples:

target="/usr/bin/program-1.2"; name="/usr/bin/program";
=> reltarget="program-1.2"

target="/usr/lib/program-1.2/bin/program"; name="/usr/bin/program-1.2";
=> reltarget="../lib/program-1.2/bin/program"

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:43

1

This will do it if you have Python 2.6 or newer on your system; you may need to modify the quoting if launching from another shell than bash.

ln -s "`python -c "import os.path; print os.path.relpath('$target','$name')"`" "$name"

Inspired by this.

edited May 23 '17 at 11:43

Community

1
1

answered Jan 10 '13 at 20:03

Joachim Isaksson

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I read the question you linked and the answers there can easily be converted to my question. That's the most nice alternative. Thanks. – Uwe Kleine-König Jan 11 '13 at 08:36

create a minimal symlink

1 Answers1