ln command

[litemirrors]

I ran the following using terminal so that my root account would use the same theme as the home

sudo ln -s ~/.themes /root/.themes
sudo ln -s ~/.icons /root/.icons
sudo ln -s ~/.fonts /root/.fonts

but I accidently did

sudo ln -s ~/.themes /root/.theme

for one of them, how can I remove it? Actually it works but why don't I see a link? What is this command doing anyway?

[litemirrors]

Re: ln command

I figured this out, it put links into the root directory that linked back to the users folder. But the trick is you can't have the folders already under root otherwise the links go into them and then won't mean nothing. Now that's fun

[Telengard]

Re: ln command

How did you get a root account?

[doctordruidphd]

Re: ln command

check out 'man ln' , although it can be confusing (as are most man pages)

sudo ln -s ~/.themes /root/.theme

since you did this as sudo, you created a link from /root/.themes to /root/.theme
and that link is located in /root
So you will need to do a 'sudo ls -al /root' to see it.

The general syntax for making a symbolic link is:

ln -s target symbol

where 'target' is the name of the file (which can be a file, program, or directory) that you are calling with the link, and 'symbol' is the name you want to call it with. Depending upon where and what the target is, and where the symbol is located, you may need to do it as sudo. So:

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/firefox /usr/bin/web

Will create a link called 'web' in /usr/bin that calls /usr/bin/firefox.

Like most older unix-related commands, it is backwards from what you would expect.

[litemirrors]

Re: ln command

I was confused to much so basically I ended up running

sudo nautilus and it brought up the window manager. Then when I navigated to the directory I was able to find them.

[Snowhog]

Re: ln command

I ended up running

sudo nautilus...

VERY DANGEROUS!!

NEVER use sudo GUI_application - NEVER -- UNLESS YOU WANT TO MESS UP YOUR /HOME/USER DIRECTORY/PARTITION.

If you need to run a GUI application with root permissions, then do so using kdesudo as this preserves the ownership:group identities on the files/directories in your users /home directory, otherwise you will very likely find that they have all been changed to root:root and you will not be able to log back in via KDM. When this happens - and if you do use sudo to launch a file manager and then work with files in your users /home directory, it will - it is fixable, but why put yourself through the pain?