Environment variables in symbolic links

user_374578 0
Viewed 22018

Can we use $HOME or other environment variable in symbolic links?

I know about using relative paths ../../.config but sometimes are to many ../ :) something like ~/.config would be more comfortable, or use of $HOME.

Edit:

habbie's answer with psmears's comment is the answer, sorry my question was incomplete.

While (as other answers show) you can use environment variables when creating symbolic links (as with any shell command!), you can't actually have environment variable (or '~') references in the symlink itself

shell unix linux
6 Answers

Even though the symbolic links are resolved by the kernel, you could still do a LD_PRELOAD trick, wrapping all libc functions that take pathnames and expand any $XYZ components in the string returned by 'readlink' (parameter expansion). Then feed the expanded path to the wrapped function. You have to escape the target path from shell expansion when creating the link, as jaztik suggests.

As the injected library has full access to the users' environment, this will fulfill all expectations of the OP.

user_125860320
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