On 24Aug2015 13:55, Paolo Galtieri <pgaltieri(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: > I've tried this on 2 different systems, and on both systems ln -s > fails in the same way. > > Here's the steps > > mkdir Test > cd Test >> afile > cd .. > ln -s Test/afile Test/afile2 > ls -l Test > > This is the output: > /bin/ls: cannot access Test/afile2: No such file or directory > total 0 > -rw-rw-r--. 1 pgaltieri pgaltieri 0 Aug 24 13:46 afile > l?????????? ? ? ? ? ? afile2 [...] Firstly, run "/bin/ls", not "ls". Many system ship with an alias called "ls" with presupplied various options, which is misleading. IMO this is a terrible idea - the alias should at least use another name. (I have ones called "l" and "L" for these conveniences, myself.) To your problem: Symlinks are strings resolved with respect to the directory in which the symlink exists. So the example above "Test/afile" => "Test/afile2" makes a symlink _in_ the directory "Test" named "afile2" pointing at "Test/afile". Therefore it tries to access the path "Test/Test/afile", which fails as one might expect. When making a symbolic link it needs to either be (a) an absolute path or (b) relative WRT to the directory hodling the link. For the latter, the reliable way is to cd to the directory and make in from inside. That way command line filename completion prodcues working results. Cheers, Cameron Simpson <cs(a)zip.com.au&gt; Unix is user-friendly. It's just picky about who its friends are.

I've tried this on 2 different systems, and on both systems ln -s fails in the same way. Here's the steps mkdir Test cd Test >afile cd .. ln -s Test/afile Test/afile2 ls -l Test This is the output: /bin/ls: cannot access Test/afile2: No such file or directory total 0 -rw-rw-r--. 1 pgaltieri pgaltieri 0 Aug 24 13:46 afile l?????????? ? ? ? ? ? afile2

On 08/24/2015 02:19 PM, Cameron Simpson wrote: >On 24Aug2015 13:55, Paolo Galtieri <pgaltieri(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: >Symlinks are strings resolved with respect to the directory in which >the symlink exists. > >So the example above "Test/afile" => "Test/afile2" makes a symlink >_in_ the directory "Test" named "afile2" pointing at "Test/afile". >Therefore it tries to access the path "Test/Test/afile", which fails >as one might expect. > >When making a symbolic link it needs to either be (a) an absolute >path or (b) relative WRT to the directory hodling the link. For the >latter, the reliable way is to cd to the directory and make in from >inside. That way command line filename completion prodcues working >results.

thank you for your reply. As it turns out the ln command ln -s Test/afile Test/afile1 does create the link.

The problem as you noted is the ls command.