Mastodawn

K. Ryabitsev-Prime 🍁Apr 5, 2024

I've been admining Linux systems for 25 years, and I still have to check which one it is every time.

K. Ryabitsev-Prime 🍁

I appreciate people saying that it's like `cp` or `mount`, but in my head the natural order of thinking about this operation is reversed: it's "create a link to this file" not "make this file also known as this link." Hence two competing "gut feelings" about which should come first. It also doesn't help that commands like "alias" work the opposite direction ("make a new command that is actually this another command").

Anyway, it was really just an observation that I confuse this all the time, and I'm not the greenest Linux admin around. :)

neopolitan Apr 5, 2024

@monsieuricon i think of it as an html hyperlink
<a href="link">link</a>

Denys Dmytriyenko Apr 5, 2024

@monsieuricon yup, 30 years of Unix/Linux daily use and I still fail this one. Reminds me of USB Type-A 50% chance of plugging it wrong, but failing it *every* time.

BTW, @bagder started a separate thread on this and people are mostly getting it right on the first try - smh...

https://mastodon.social/@bagder/112220659572117434

Danny Faught Apr 6, 2024

@denix @monsieuricon @bagder Oh, it's more than that. You have to try 3 times to plug in USB-A. And it's the same for ln. Neither order works the first time.

digital_bohemian Apr 6, 2024

@denix @monsieuricon @bagder

USB always needs three attempts:

1. Wait, this feels awkward, better try the other way round.
2. No, that's _definitely_ wrong. It _has_ to be the other way round.
3. Ahh...

🐧DaveNull🐧 ☣️pResident Evil☣Apr 5, 2024

@monsieuricon I had the same issue for a while.

Especially since I rarely use ln. I try to convince my brain that "-s" would mean "source" even though I know it actually means "symbolic link", just so I remember that the first argument right after the "-s" option is the existing, "source" file.

Voline Apr 6, 2024

@devnull @monsieuricon
Good hack!

Chris Gascoigne Apr 5, 2024

@monsieuricon 100%. Saying it’s like cp is not helpful as my mental model is the link going the other way (i.e. a link that points to the real file)

Walter Tross Apr 5, 2024

@monsieuricon With time everything will fit in place, your gut feelings will be gone, and ln will behave like cp.
(BTW: alias is different: it has a single parameter that is an assignment)

Refurio Anachro Apr 8, 2024

Yes, but what about tar?

@waltertross @monsieuricon

Michael Bacon Apr 5, 2024

Yeah, when I say it's like cp, that doesn't mean it's intuitive. I just have to repeat the mantra.

vilibald Apr 5, 2024

@monsieuricon I for one suffer the same but because I remember it is the other way around a get confused and have to look :) If there was a system wide config to set it in one of the ways!

anarcat Apr 6, 2024

@monsieuricon i'm kind of fascinated that people think it worthwhile to try to school *you* of all people, if even @monsieuricon has trouble with this, the problem is not with @monsieuricon, it's with the damn thing :)

Tom Apr 6, 2024

@monsieuricon I think of it like cp/mv because the order is "existing thing" "new thing"

Raven667 Apr 6, 2024

@tjk @monsieuricon that's a good way to remember because I think the confusion is that a symlink itself points to a target thing so is the source the symlink itself that points or is thw source the real file and the target the symlink you want to create?

Paul Williams Apr 6, 2024

@monsieuricon @dgar every single time - my command history is:

$ man ln

$ ln -s blah blah

Cannot make it stick.

cathos Apr 6, 2024

@monsieuricon I feel like we could afford to make a better convention for these tools. Like using > to indicate directionality (I know that's used for redirection, though) or... something. What sort of hints could make these tools easier to use?

NEPŘÁTELSKÉ EMOCE 🇺🇦🇨🇿Apr 6, 2024

@monsieuricon haha while i'm in the "bro it's like cp(1)" crowd, i can appreciate where you're coming from because of memcpy(dest,src, ..).

i tend to find myself in this situation when it comes to unfamiliar assembly syntaxes, or even at&t vs. intel -- is it like cp(1) or is it like memcpy(3)

lores3000 Apr 6, 2024

@monsieuricon my mental model for all commands is that the first file is input, second is output. That said i have always had problems memorizing linux command names and arguments and need to look most of them up…

Albert (a.k.a Larry)Apr 6, 2024

@monsieuricon I actually remembered this 20 years ago because I gave the -s the alternative meaning of "source". So if you think it like this, you'll never be wrong

Riley S. Faelan Apr 6, 2024

@monsieuricon Yes, it's a Sapir-Whorf thing. Some languages are verb-subject-object, and some are verb-object-subject. Yoda even speaks object-subject-verb (in the original, anyway; it's trickier in the German translation).

Don't think of it as a matter of abstract intuition, but as a matter of foreign language intuition. The intuition of consistency, not the intuition of essence.

Riley S. Faelan Apr 6, 2024

@monsieuricon In CP/M, copying used to go the other way: pip destination=source. If Unix has been modelled after that, we'd be doing hard links by pip destination<=souce, and symlinks as pip destination<-source.

Mia ‘Meetings? I Abstain’ Luna Tearmoon Apr 6, 2024

@riley @monsieuricon oh I missed this comment and posted mine… (CP/M was my ‘first’ OS)

Riley S. Faelan Apr 6, 2024

@mia FWIW, I kind of suspect that CP/M's PIP was, in turn, modelled after something that DEC used to ship with PDP-11, the cradle of OSes. Even Unix comes from it!
@monsieuricon

Jona 🐳Apr 6, 2024

@monsieuricon It won’t help, but in the olden days (at least), mv, cp & ln were all links to the same binary, which examined its argv[0] to see how it was invoked. That was such a weird hack that it’s been easy (for me) to remember all these decades later.

Michael Aye Apr 13, 2024

@monsieuricon @monsieuricon how about this trick: it’s “target linkname” because linkname can be omitted for the link to get the same file name and that wouldn’t work the other way around.