Creating Symbolic links from home to Dropbox

PrimevalWalrus · 02-03-2017, 12:58 PM

I'm trying to sync some directories to my Dropbox folder without moving them, but it's not working. I've tried, for example ln -s Documents Dropbox/Documents, but it shows up in whatever file explorer I try as a broken link, so I'm assuming it not going to work. I've also tried ln -s Documents/* Dropbox/Documents/ but all the links show up as broken. I tried a few times to change the permissions on my Documents folder but chmod makes my head hurt. Is it possible to do what I'm trying to do? Just to be perfectly clear, what I want to do is create a symlink from, e.g. ~/Documents to my Dropbox folder so it will sync to Dropbox, without having to move my Documents folder or keep two copies of those files. Once I get it working, I'd like to do the same thing with my Music, Pictures, and Video folders. I use Dropbox for syncing, not sharing. Also, I'm aware there are probably options that work better w/ Linux than Dropbox, but I'm already paying for it. I'm using the stable release of Debian 8.

szboardstretcher · 02-03-2017, 01:05 PM

What is the full path to 'Documents' and 'Dropbox'?

Something like /home/user/Documents or similar.

What are the permissions of 'Documents' and 'Dropbox'?

Something like 'stat Documents' and 'stat Dropbox'...

PrimevalWalrus · 02-03-2017, 01:25 PM

Ok so I actually solved this problem by using the "create link" command in nautilus. I didn't think it was working at first because my I'm out of high-speed data for the month. And here I thought GUIs were just for the simple minded

halek37 · 03-13-2017, 07:55 PM

I was going to start a thread with my question but did a search for Dropbox first. Your thread showed up so I thought I try you first since you seem to be using dropbox.

I am using debian on a Rpi and thought I had followed the instructions from (https://www.dropbox.com/install-linux). I installed the debian 32bit version. But when I tried to run dropbox using the first line in the CODE below this is the listing from my terminal. NOTE: I added LF where the \\ are shown.

Code:

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ ~/.dropbox-dist/dropboxd
/home/pi/.dropbox-dist/dropbox-lnx.x86-21.4.25 \\
/dropbox: 1: /home/pi/.dropbox-dist/dropbox- \\
lnx.x86-21.4.25/dropbox: \\ 
Syntax error: word unexpected (expecting ")")

I also tried this command

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ dropboxd
bash: dropboxd: command not found

Can anybody spot where I went wrong?