Using Symbolic Link
#post
This post originally appeared on Blog 2.0
Alias are great in that they allow you to navigate to a folder elsewhere. However, aliases break when you try to use it with a terminal or anything power-user-ish.
Symbolic links (aka symlink or soft link) solve this by creating references to another path in a way that affects pathname resolution.
H2 Implementation
To create a symbolic link on mac, do this:
ln -s /original/path /linked/path
It’s probably the same on Linux
H2 Use case
Let’s say you put a git repository on iCloud Drive (also applies to OneDrive, etc.). That wouldn’t be a good idea as iCloud now syncs all the files in the .git folder.
To stop iCloud from syncing .git, we can rename it to .git.tmp or .git.nosync, but this breaks git (duh).
What we can do, therefore, is to create a symbolic link to .git.tmp from the proper name .git.
ln -s .git.tmp .git
Now that .git points to .git.tmp but doesn’t contain files itself. Problem solved
References