Unable to create symbolic link of compiled executable to my PATH directory

Question

I've compiled this build of the SameBoy Game Boy emulator with success. However I'm unable to ln -s the resulting executable to my PATH directory in ~/.bin/, as it returns too many levels of symbolic links: ./sameboy when I try to execute the symlink.

Answer 1

Let's assume the working executable is in ~/sameboy/bin. So this works just fine, running the game system for you:

cd ~/sameboy/bin
./sameboy

I suspect this is what you've done to add it to your ~/.bin directory in your PATH:

cd ~/sameboy/bin
ln -s ./sameboy ~/.bin    # does not work

Unfortunately what this did was create a symbolic link in ~/.bin pointing literally to ./sameboy. In the context of the symbolic link this is itself (the link file, not the intended target executable). You can verify this with

cd ~/.bin
ls -l sameboy

You can fix it by going to your ~/.bin directory and recreating the symbolic link so it points to your actual executable:

cd ~/.bin
rm sameboy                      # your broken symlink
ln -s ../sameboy/bin/sameboy    # relative or absolute path to the executable