I recently installed firefox in my home directory. I wanted to symlink the executable to a directory thats already in my $PATH. I have $HOME/bin added to my $PATH. Firefox is located in $HOME/bin/firefox. When I try ln -s $HOME/bin/firefox/firefox $HOME/bin I get error message ln: `bin/firefox': cannot overwrite directory.
I know I can just add the firefox directory to my $PATH. But I think it's more effecient to just symlink the executable. I'm a relativey newbie and I haven't really used the symlink command much. So I'm sure the problem is something really obvious and simple.

If someone could help I would appreciate it.
Thanks.

You're trying to create 2 objects with the same name in the one directory - a sub-directory called firefox that already exists and a link called firefox.

Can you install firefox somewhere else? /usr/lib/firefox-1.x.x is a popular location - even /usr/local/firefox-1.x.x or /opt/firefox-1.x.x would work. Then you can create the symlink again and it should work just fine.

Like the previous post said.

So use another link name
ls -s $HOME/bin/firefox/firefox $HOME/bin/Firefox (use capital F or any other name that isn't firefox)

Thanks for the ideas. Well I tryed the symlink command ln -s $HOME/bin/firefox/firefox $HOME/bin/Firefox(capitalized F). Now the Firefox symlink is displayed in red when i 'ls' it. And when I issue 'file' command to Firefox i get message "bin/Firefox: broken symbolic link to bin/firefox/firefox." Why is it broken now. Any ideas?

Now that's odd - I copy/pasted what you did into a terminal and it worked for me. Can you do `ls -l $HOME/bin/Firefox` and confirm that the location it is pointing to exists? For example:

Yeah here is what i get using ls -l.
total 4
drwx------ 12 newbie newbie 4096 Feb 13 20:32 firefox
lrwxrwxrwx 1 newbie newbie 19 Feb 13 20:49 Firefox -> bin/firefox/firefox

Except "Firefox -> bin/firefox/firefox" is all in red.

Here is what I get when I issue file command to Firefox.

file Firefox
Firefox: broken symbolic link to bin/firefox/firefox

What does ls -l $HOME/bin/firefox/firefox display?

I went ahead and removed the symlink for now.
Here is what ls -l $HOME/bin/firefox/firefox displays.

ls -l bin/firefox/firefox
-rwx------ 1 5247 Jan 24 19:32 bin/firefox/firefox

Your $HOME/bin/firefox directory is on the same partition as the $HOME/bin directory isn't it? I get that error when I create symlinks to files on different partitions.

Yeah there on the same directory. I have simple set up very few partitions.

I wonder if I moved the firefox to another $HOME directory called "programs" or something like that and created a symlink to it in $HOME/bin would be different?
I don't know, wierd.

Even moving the directory to $HOME/bin/firefox-1.5 should allow a link from $HOME/bin/firefox-1.5/firefox to $HOME/bin/firefox. But yes, moving it to somewhere else will do the trick (as long as the symlink is on the same partition as the file it points to).

The link should point to the entire path i.e
Firefox -> /home/username/bin/firefox/firefox.

For some reason $HOME environment variable does not appear to be assigned anything. You can see from gilead's post
$HOME expands to /home/websters.

Instead of $HOME you can use the full path in your link statement.
BTW what is the output of
echo $HOME

My $HOME variable is set correctly. Here is what I get when I issue the command "echo $Home" /home/newbie. I believe the problem may have been I didn't use an absolute path but a relative path.

Anyway. I did finally got the symlink to work. I moved the firefox directory to a new directory "program_files" and made a symlink to it in my home directory. It seems to be working fine!

Thanks guys for your help.