Search code examples
macossymlink

Creating Merged Folder of Symlinks on macOS

I'm attempting to use the perl script below to create symlinks of all folders from three locations. My desired result would be something like:

Source
/TV720/GoT/Season00/

/TV1080/GoT/Season01/

/TV2160/GoT/Season02/

Destination (Symlink)

/TV/GoT/Season00/

/TV/GoT/Season01/

/TV/GoT/Season02/

However when I run the script, I get: /TV/GoT/Season00/ without the other folders found in other sources.

It appears the 2nd and 3rd source location sub-folders aren't symlinked and merged in the event of duplicate folder names.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my @sourceList = (
    "/Volumes/Disk/TV720",
    "/Volumes/Disk/TV1080",
    "/Volumes/Disk/TV2160",
);
my $destinationFolder = "/Volumes/Disk/TV";

foreach my $currentSource (@sourceList) {

    opendir SDIR, $currentSource  or do {
    warn "$0: can't opendir $currentSource: $!\n";
    next;
    };
    my @sourceFolders = grep { not /^\.{1,2}$/ } readdir SDIR;
    closedir SDIR;

    foreach my $currentFolder (sort @sourceFolders) {

    my $fromPath = $currentSource     . '/' . $currentFolder;
    my $toPath   = $destinationFolder . '/' . $currentFolder;

    if (not -e $toPath) {
        # print "Creating $toPath as symlink to $fromPath\n";
        symlink $fromPath, $toPath
        or warn "$0: can't symlink $toPath to $fromPath: $!\n";
    }
    }
}
Solution

  • Given the information above, you might be able to accomplish what you want with union mounts on the file system. This is where you can overlay directories on top of other directories. It's more advanced than a symlink for sure, but it might do what you want.

    If you want to continue with the symlinks, I would suggest modifying your script to loop through your sources and recursively iterate the subfolders in each directory.

    Then for each subfolder, create an actual new folder in the destination, then iterate the files in the source subfolder and symlink each file individually.