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I'm running Fedora on a laptop with a small SSD and large HDD. I've got the OS installed on the SSD and my data on the HDD.

All my files are located at /run/media/kennedy/data/Kennedy

What I had before (and want again) is a symlink from /home/kennedy to that location. That way I'm not messing with actual /home, but when I am in /home as normal user, all my things are easily accessed and stored with plenty of space. Right now /home/kennedy has the standard directories; desktop, documents, downloads, and so forth. No files worth worrying about.

So I opened a shell, logged in as su, and entered

ln -s /home/kennedy /run/media/kennedy/data/Kennedy

expecting that when I cd /home/kennedy and ls, I would see all my lovelies. Instead, I see that standard folders and nothing more. Whisky Tango Foxtrot, over.

edit to add: I'm pretty sure the permissions are right, but only pretty sure. How do I check and correct that (if off)?

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
4

You have to reverse the arguments:

ln -s /run/media/kennedy/data/Kennedy /home/kennedy

This will:

  • run successfully if /home/kennedy doesn't exist (kennedy would be the new symlink)
  • fail if /home/kennedy exists and it is not a directory (symlink or a regular file); need add -f flag in such a case - ls -sf ...
  • if /home/kennedy is a directory, then the symlink will be created as /home/kennedy/kennedy

See this related post: How to symlink a file in Linux?

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2 Comments

Maybe I wasn't clear. /home/kennedy is not a directory I created, it is the directory created for the user "kennedy" so that, when logged in as kennedy and looking at /home in the GUI you actually see the contents of /home/kennedy. What I want to happen is that when the user looks at that directory, they see the contents of /run/media/kennedy/data/Kennedy. I don't want to open /home/kennedy and see the symlink. the directory /home/kennedy should be nothing more than a window to the HDD directory. Do I need to remove the directory kennedy and create the symlink?
I am not sure what content is already there in /home/kennedy. So, it will be more prudent to do mv /home/kennedy /home/kennedy.old rather than removing it.
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You have the command backwards, it should be:

ln -s /run/media/kennedy/data/Kennedy kennedy

Invoke the command while you are in your /home directory, then you should be set.

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