Pseudocode
ln -s $HOME/file $HOME/Documents/ $HOME/Desktop/ where I want to create a symlink from the source to two destinations. Probably, moreutils and pee.
How can you create many symlinks from one source?
asked Jun 1, 2016 at 21:10
Léo Léopold Hertz 준영
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3 Answers
You can't do this with a single invocation of ln,but you could loop through all necessary destinations:
$ for i in "$HOME/Documents/" "$HOME/Desktop/"; do ln -s "$HOME/file" "$i"; done 
- 2You could omit the quotes if your home base directory does not contain spaces or other characters to be escaped, e.g. punctuation. However, using quotes always where appropriate makes a habit that keeps you from mistakes in other cases where directory/file names could easily contain special charsSerge– Serge2016-06-02 15:04:08 +00:00Commented Jun 2, 2016 at 15:04
If you have gnu parallel you could try with
parallel ln -s /path/file {} ::: /path/dest1 /path/dest2 /path/dest3 or, to symlink multiple targets to (the same) multiple destinations
parallel ln -s {1} {2} ::: /path/file1 /path/file2 ::: /path/dest1 /path/dest2 
- 2@Masi Make sure you run the
parallelcommand from theparallelpackage and not the one frommoreutils.Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'– Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'2016-06-01 22:27:51 +00:00Commented Jun 1, 2016 at 22:27
It's no less verbose than two separate ln -s invocations:
echo $HOME/Documents/ $HOME/Desktop/ | xargs -n 1 ln -s $HOME/file but that only works for absolute paths (because symbolic links are interpreted relative to their parent directory, unless they're absolute).
(The relative cost drops of course as the number of links goes up. Also, this snippet relies on the fact that $HOME doesn't contain any spaces, tabs or newlines.)
