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symlinks made easier

Posted on 5 mins read Tags: Python

For years I’ve been struggling with the ln command.


$ man ln

      ln [OPTION]... TARGET                  (2nd form)



A symlink is a special file that “points” to an other.

I’ve seen it used frequently in the download folder of servers:

$ ls -l  download
latest -> 0.3

Thus, when you go to you always get the latest release, and to deploy a new release, one can:

  • Upload the 0.4 release
  • Re-create the latest symlink

Which are “atomic” operations, meaning:

  • The filesystem is always in a coherent state
  • It’s easy to revert to a previous release if necessary.

So, my mental image of a link is an arrow, going from one filename to an other:

a -> b  (link from a to b)
a <- b  (link to a from b)

But a and b can be in any order.

Choosing parameter names

The first thing I did was to use variable names that I could understand.

I choose the names from and to:

def ln(*, from_, to):
    os.symlink(to, from_)

I’m using Python3 syntax to make sure that both from and to have to be explicitly specified when calling the function.

I also use from_ with an underscore at the end because from is a Python keyword.

Note that in Python2, I would have written

def ln(from_=None, to=None):

but then nothing would have prevented people (including me), from using ln(a, b), which is exactly what I want to avoid.

I also wrote a test which forced me to get the order of the os.symlink() call right.

Because of course, I also don’t know how to call os.symlink(), arguments are named src and dest, and those names are as meaningless to me as the names in the ln man page …

Coming up with a Command Line Interface

First attempt

My first idea was to have two ways to call my ln wrapper, with names that remembered me about the direction of the arrow.

So something like ln-lt (for the lesser than sign, aka <) and ln-gt (for the greater than sign, aka >).

But that was confusing, and the code was not very readable:

def main_lt(a, b):
    _main("<", a, b)

def main_gt(a, b):
    _main(">", a, b)

def _main(direction, a, b):
    from_ = a
    to = b
    if direction == "<":
        # going the other way, need to swap:
        from_, to = to, from_

Second attempt

And then I realized I could just use the names first and second, display the two possibilities and let the user (me) choose interactively:

def main(first, second):
    print("1.", first,  "->", second)
    print("2.", second, "->", first)

    answer = input("Which one? ")
    if answer == "1":
        from_ = first
        to = args.second
    elif answer == "2":
        to = first
        from_ = second
        sys.exit("Please choose between 1. and 2.")

Going Interactive

Since I was already interacting with the user, the next logical step was to handle the case where the symlink already exists.

Normally, when I get an error from ln looking like:

$ ln -s bar foo
ln: failed to create symbolic link 'foo': File exists

my first instinct is to run ls -l to check that I’m actually overwriting a symbolic link, (which is easy to revert) and not a regular file (which could lead to data loss).

Then I use rm foo, which prompts me for a confirmation (because I’ve aliased rm to rm -i 1), or I re-run the ln command with the --force switch.

I realize I could avoid doing all that with just a few more lines of code:

if os.path.islink(from_):
    dest = os.readlink(from_)
    message = "{} -> {} already exists. Overwrite? (Y/n) "
    message = message.format(from_, dest)
    answer = input(message)
    if answer == "n":

if os.path.exists(from_) and not os.path.islink(from_):
    message = "Error: {} already exists and is not a symlink"

Releasing to the world

After that, I created a github repo, made a release on pip and created a quick demo on asciinema because that’s what the cool kids seem to do nowadays.

I don’t really expect contributions because the code does everything I need, and I don’t really expect you to want to use it.

(Maybe you’ve managed to remember the order of arguments because it’s EXISTING NEW, the same order as cp, or maybe you have a different mental image of symlinks, or you don’t use the command line at all, and nothing is wrong with you).

Nevertheless, I though it would be interesting to show an example of how you can tweak your tools to have an API and UI that matches how your brain works.

Plus it’s a nice way to show you how Python3 is awesome :P

Update: someone had the same kind of idea for implementing a safer rm. You can read more on github

  1. Old habit. This one is not likely to go away … [return]

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