Linux productivity tools and practices for researchers
Symbolic links allow you to quickly reference various paths and move throughout the filesystem.
From your home directory you could cd to your /scratch/gpfs directory with:
$ cd /scratch/gpfs/<YourNetID>
However, with a symbolic link called scr you would just type:
$ cd scr
With shopt -s autocd in your .bashrc file the cd could be omitted: $ scr
Here is how to create the link in your home directory:
$ cd ~
$ ln --symbolic /scratch/gpfs/<YourNetID> scr # Tiger, Della, Stellar
$ ln --symbolic /scratch/network/<YourNetID> scr # Adroit
You can use a different name instead of scr. Choose something concise, representative and original (so that it doesn’t conflict with an existing command).
Symbolic links can be used for any operation involving a path, for example:
$ cd ~
$ touch file1.txt
$ cp file1.txt scr
$ cd scr
$ pwd
/home/aturing/scr
$ pwd -P
/scratch/gpfs/aturing
$ ll
-rw-r--r--. 1 aturing math 226 Oct 5 23:50 file1.txt
One could use an alias for scr instead of a symbolic link but the symbolic link is in general the better choice. For instance, it allows for tab completion so you can easily cd into a subdirectory (e.g., cd /scr/data). Symbolic links can also be used in paths when scp is used to transfer files. One advantage of the alias is that is could be ran from any working directory.
Consider adding the alias below so that symbolic links are always resolved (i.e., pwd gives /scratch/gpfs/aturing instead of /home/aturing/scr in the example above):
alias pwd='pwd -P'
Make a second symbolic link from your home directory to /projects:
$ cd ~
$ ln --symbolic /projects/<letter>/<YourNetID> prj # Della, Stellar, Tiger
Can you think of another symbolic link that could be used to speed-up your workflow? Maybe a link to the directory containing your current project.
IMPORTANT: To remove a symbolic link use, for example, $ rm prj. Do not include a trailing slash after the symbolic link name.