How To Create a Symbolic Link

Every time I want to create a symlink on the command line it seems to take me half an hour. I never get the syntax right as many times as I read the documentation, so I’m posting here with what makes sense to me and my use of Dropbox.

Usually I want to relocate a local folder to Dropbox so that it’s backed up. As an example, I might have a mystuff folder in my user’s home directory.

  1. Move the current mystuff folder to Dropbox.
  2. Run this from the command line.
    ln -s ~/Dropbox/mystuff ~/mystuff
  3. Enjoy the piece of mind that data is automatically backed up.

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