How can I create a symbolic link that depends on other files?

Question

I know my topic is a little confusing, but here is what I want to do.

I have a file which I would like to create a link to in my home directory ~/bin, but when I execute the file that is symbolically linked, the file requires another file in its directory. Therefore, it fails to run because it cannot find the other file. What can I do?

Answer 1

Well, you have two simple solutions.

1. edit the shell script to point to the absolute path of the file, not just the the basename.

   ./path/to/file.sh VS file.sh

   so something like this should do what your after. sed -i 's|file.sh|./path/to/file.sh|g' ~/bin/script.sh it searches your symlinked file, script.sh in this case, and replaces the call to file.sh to ./path/to/file.sh. note you often see sed use /'s. but it can use just about anything as a delimiter, if you wish to use /'s here you will need to escape them. /. you may want to consider escaping the . (period) as well, but in this case its not necessary. If you are new to sed realize that the -i flag means it will edit the file in place. Lastly, realize its a simple search and replace operation and you may chose to do it by hand.

2. The second way is to create a ln -s to the file as you did with the other file so there exists a symbolic link between both files.

   ln -s /far/off/script.sh ~/bin/script.sh

   and

   ln -s /far/off/file.sh ~/bin/file.sh

more on symlinking