Linking of a folder to a harddrive

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi,
i would like to link a folder, in my case that is ‘Pictures’ to a different harddrive with a folder containing pictures.
So whenever i save pictures it would save by default onto the harddrive with the linked folder.
How can i do that. I tried to do it with ls i think but this makes softlinks which did not let me open automatically open the other folder. omg i hope i don’t make it to complicated to understand.

So here a visual plan of it.

the default folder
/
/home/user/pictures

like to link it to

/media/pictures/photoshots
so this is the harddrive (another internal harddrive) which contains a different folder where i store my photos in general.

Any idea?

2

Quick and clean: open a terminal window as your user and create a symbolic link:


ln -s /media/pictures/photoshots ~/Pictures

This creates a symlink called Pictures in your homedir (/home/YOURUSERNAME, also ~/ ) to /media/pictures/photoshots. KDE apps will follow the symlink. No difference between opening/writing from/in ~/Pictures or /media/pictures/photoshots. Clicking it in Dolphin will open the same folder.

Please let us know results.

3

It does not matter if a directory is a mount point or not. So the whole idea about “hard drive” can be removed from your question.

When I understand correctly what you want you should do:

ln -s /media/pictures/photoshots /home/user/pictures

and /home/user/pictures should of course not exist before you do this.

4

yes, that worked.
Good that you mentioned to delete the folder. Well, you implied that.
Otherwise it creates it in the folder.

But it did work. Good thing.

Thanks

Problem solved :slight_smile:

5

Nice I could help you.

Bear in mind that* ln* is creating a file (a special type, but it is an entry in the directory it will live in) and thus you can not create what allready is there (even if it is of a different type).

Second is that many people think that that mountpoints are very special beasts. But they are only directories, made as every directory, have owner:group and access bits as every directory. Maybe the system administrator (you) knows that something will be (or is) mounted on such a directory. But for the end-user (on a PC maybe again: you) this is of no concern whatsoever. She/he travels up and down the directory tree, never being concerned if she/he switches from partition to partition during those travels. And those partitions may be on the same or an other device or even on another system. Every effort is taken in Unix/Linux to hide this away from the end-user.