failed to create symbolic link - no such file or directory

Question

I ran this command that a user on reddit wrote for me:

dest=final_dir
files=$(find dir1 dir2 dir3 -type f)


for file_path in $files; do
    IFS='/' read -r -a tokens <<< "$file_path"
    dest_fname="${tokens[1]}.${tokens[0]}"
    ln -s "$PWD/$file_path" "$PWD/$dest/$dest_fname"
done

It is supposed to take all files in all subfolders and create a symlink to another directory with the name of the link being filename+filefolder. It does however only give me the error: failed to create symbolic link - no such file or directory here is a screenshot of the console: https://imgur.com/36F4sdX

any ideas what could be the problem?

Edit: Ok, the problem seems to be that it when the path includes a space, it thinks the name stops at this space and thus doesnt find the file. Any idea how to fix this?

Here a description of what the script is supposed to do. my current filesystem looks like this:

dir1: file1, file2

dir2: file1, file2

if i now run the above command i get:

dir3: file1, file2

and the other 2 files are skipped as they have the same name.

also given this scenario:

dir1: file1, file3

dir2: file2, file4

in this case the files would be mixed to:

dir3: file1, file2, file3, file4

what i want though is:

dir3: file1, file3, file2, file4

In my opinion the easiest way to achieve this would be to make the source folder part of the symlinks name, like this:

dir3: dir1-file1, dir1-file3, dir2-file3, dir2-file4

I hope this explains it well enough.

The problem right now seems to be that when file- or foldername contain any special characters like "-" or "_" it stops reading the name at that point.

This results in: dir1-2: file3-4 creating a symlink to dir1.file3 which doesnt exist

user_2402272 · Answer

ln -s does not care about whether the source path exists, so the problem must be with the target path. The command creates a symbolic link, so if it is complaining that a file or directory does not exist then the issue must be with the path to the target link, not the link's name.

In your case, the target path is "$PWD/$dest/$dest_fname".

From its construction, it does not appear that $dest_fname can contain / characters, so it is a simple file name without any path components.

$PWD represents (the shell's idea of) the present working directory. Unless you are playing games with that variable or the working directory has been deleted out from under you, $PWD will expand to the name of an existing directory.

That leaves $dest as the probable locus of the issue. The script does nothing to ensure that the directory it designates exists, so the most plausible explanation is that it does not. Consider adding

mkdir -p "$PWD/$dest"

to your script, immediately prior to the for loop, if you want it to create the destination directory at need.

failed to create symbolic link - no such file or directory

1 Answers