Make a symbolic link to a relative pathname

Question

I can do this:

$ pwd
/home/beau
$ ln -s /home/beau/foo/bar.txt /home/beau/bar.txt
$ readlink -f bar.txt
/home/beau/foo/bar.txt

But I'd like to be able to do this:

$ pwd
/home/beau
$ cd foo
$ ln -s bar.txt /home/beau/bar.txt
$ readlink -f /home/beau/bar.txt
/home/beau/foo/bar.txt

Is this possible? Can I somehow resolve the relative pathname and pass it to ln?

Answer 1

If you create a relative path to a symbolic link, it will store it as a relative symbolic link, not absolute like your example shows. This is generally a good thing. Absolute symbolic links don't work when the filesystem is mounted elsewhere. The reason your example doesn't work is that it's relative to the parent directory if the symbolic link and not where ln is run.

Answer 2

Sorry, no. Symbolic links are relative to the location the link is in, not the location you were when you created the link. There are several good reasons for this behavior, most of which involve mounting remote filesystems.

Answer 3

You could try:

ln -s `pwd`/bar.txt /home/beau/bar.txt

But, it makes a symbolic link to the absolute pathname. Your textual question asks mentions relative pathname...

Normally, a relative pathname is what you want, and what ln -s gives you. I think what you want is:

cd /home/beau
ln -s foo/bar.txt bar.txt