Post #1904070
2026-05-02 21:41 UTC
Replies (21)
-
@shrub900@mastodon.social 2026-05-02 21:43
@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org i mean, i haven’t even been alive for 30 years, but i make this mistake all the time
-
@spacehobo@teh.entar.net 2026-05-02 21:46
@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org The way I fixed it in my head was when I memorised that if you leave out the second argument, it makes the link in the CWD with the name of the first argument. So obviously the first argument is the target, because the second argument is optional!
-
@simon_lucy@mastodon.social 2026-05-02 21:46
@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org +1
-
@rmsilva@mamot.fr 2026-05-02 21:49
@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org I stopped doing that mistake when memorized that the first one is "what already exists", which I just realized also works for 'cp' and 'mv'.
-
@downey@floss.social 2026-05-02 21:52
@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org pretty much every time Sometimes I'll think to just type it without args to get the sequence
-
@north@xn--8r9a.com 2026-05-02 21:57
@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org every single time
-
@lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me 2026-05-02 22:02
@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org With -s I'd more compare the behavior to chmod/chown given it's non-mangled and so relative to the symlink location, you write the link target (1) into a symlink file (2).
-
@vagrantc@floss.social 2026-05-02 22:10
@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org Sorry, I can only say I make that mistake routinely after 27~28 years of making symlinks with the "ln" command... I have no idea what that would be like after 30 years!
-
@mezzodrinker@social.mezzo.moe 2026-05-02 22:13
@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org I remember ln as "create a new alias for at ", which has been working out pretty well for me so far. But I agree that it is counter-intuitive when compared to other command line tools.
-
@jtheo@hachyderm.io 2026-05-02 22:20
@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org nope. I also forget most of the time that I don't need the destination if I am in the right dir... Most of the time aka the target has a long name :(
-
@arkades@sciences.social 2026-05-02 22:21
@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org same after 15 years. I expected to get it right until 30 years passed. But ln is a special case: ln [opts] TARGET LINK_NAME Usually I expect the target to be the last argument, DSL semantics of a teleological projection. But when linking, the target is the link name during linkage, but after linkage is done, the source of operation becomes the target of the link. It's similar confusing to write a clean linked list interface in C IMHO. Hope this helps. For my case it still didn't.
-
@carmenlisandrette@mastodon.social 2026-05-02 22:23
@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org Using ln is like plugging in an old USB cable for me. It doesn't work the first time, the second time or the third time.... I always mess up -p and -P when I'm using scp as well. Why is it different between ssh and scp??
-
@mjw@mastodon.nl 2026-05-02 22:26
@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org just recompile coreutils with https://gnu.wildebeest.org/~mark/ls.patch $ src/ls -l y lrwxrwxrwx. 1 mark mark 1 mei 2 23:57 x <- y
-
@ptvirgo@mastodon.social 2026-05-02 23:00
@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org I think I was doing pretty good with it just by remembering that it feels counterintuitive. Unfortunately, reading your post got me turned around again so my success rate will probably bldrop back to 50% for a while.
-
@ivt@mastodon.social 2026-05-02 23:01
@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org it has the same order of arguments as cp and mv.
-
@x1101@toot.community 2026-05-02 23:13
@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org it hasn't been quite 30 years for me, but yes. Every time. I have to look it up, again.
-
@jzb@hachyderm.io 2026-05-02 23:25
@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org I can assure you that you’re not. @smlx@fosstodon.org
-
@beaufils@mastodon.social 2026-05-02 23:30
@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org I do not know why but I do not make this mistake anymore. I think I did not do it since at least 25 years. I think my brain exploded first time I had to explain it to students and since then has been glued in the "right" way. 'ln -s x y' is understood by my muscles as: copy/put the path x as the content of the y file (exactly as cp or mv). For me content of symbolic links are just path. I do not think at the 'ls: representation when using 'ln -s'. #Unix
-
@liw@toot.liw.fi 2026-05-03 03:21
@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org I've hammered into my brain "I'm creating a new thing y that points at x" so "ln x y" comes more easily to me now. But I still check after creating the symlink.
-
@johns@social.librem.one 2026-05-03 03:59
@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org I tricked myself into remembering this by telling myself that I can create multiple links to one source, and so of course the new names have to be last because you can have as many of them as you want. Which of course you can't, but don't tell me that, because it works and I never need to do that anyway.
-
@FLOX_advocate@floss.social 2026-05-03 06:52
@bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org it took years, but I think I mostly got over it while teaching Wanted to help the students avoid some of my hangups :) My most common ln error at this point is for -l not being an option on those occasions where I typo ls Well, that's probably more a thinko triggering the wrong finger macro