My Unix vocabulary is failing me. I have 5 billion images in /foo/live/images.
For the purposes of developing a new version of the app I'd like to make /foo/dev/images into a working path without making a copy of the images.
Is this a soft link? What's the right term? What's the command-line syntax to create the link?
Dead simple, it's just a symbolic link:
ln -s /foo/live/images /foo/dev/images
Just watch the directory permissions etc. To view the man page (all available options) for the ln command, enter the following at the prompt:
man ln
You can use either symbolic links or hard links (for individual files) assuming they are on the same filesystem.
cd /foo/live; find images -type d -printf "mkdir -vp '/foo/dev/%p'\n" -o -type f -printf "ln -vs '/foo/live/%p' '/foo/dev/%p'\n" | sh
Whether you do this or cd /foo/dev; ln -s ../live/images . depends on whether you might write into the images directory.
