LinuxQuestions.org - show contents of one directory in another.

- Linux - Newbie (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/)

- - show contents of one directory in another. (https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/show-contents-of-one-directory-in-another-4175511508/)

show contents of one directory in another.

drawing a total blank hope you guys can help me out.

I am trying to remember the command to link directories.

I need to show the contents of /var/home_volume in /home. I was abe to this once before and I remember it not being the normal symbolic link process.

The last time I did this was to display /home in a folder called /workspace. So if i created a new user in /home it showed up in /workspace.

IDK maybe it is a symbolic link but /home is already created. I could have sworn there is another method. Hope I am able to get my point across.

The ordinary symlink should work.
ln -s /var/home_volume $HOME/home_volume

You can also automount at boot in fstab using bind.
Something like this:
UUID=f7927995-b098-42be-ada0-987857f5177a /var ext4 defaults,noatime 0 0
/var/home_volume $HOME/Documents auto bind 0 0

Directories cannot be hard link but you can soft link them. As you said you want to show contents of one directory to be shown in other. You can use:

Code:

ln -s <parent directory> <directory you want to show contents in>, example: ln -s <home> <home_test>

Remember that the other directory where you want to show the contents should not already exist. It will be automatically get created by ln -s.

The folders are already created. I wanted to avoid rebuilding them. Symbolic link will require the folder to not exist right?

Yes that is correct. However, you can have a sub-folder inside that which contains symlink to your parent folder. Example:

Code:

/tmp/test_dir (already exist)

/tmp/test_dir1 (already exist)



get into /tmp/test_dir1 and then run:



ln -s /tmp/test_dir testing

This will create a child directory under /tmp/test_dir1/testing which will actually point to /tmp/test_dir.

So what you're saying is, /var/home_volume already exists and has files/dirs inside. In addition, /home already exists and has files/dirs inside. And you want to merge these two directories so that all files/dirs from BOTH locations are shown side-by-side in /home ?

The cleanest way, I would think, would be to move the contents of /home to /var/home_volume, delete /home, and then symlink or bind mount /var/home_volume to /home. If that's not an option, I suppose you could loop through all files/dirs in /var/home_volume and symlink them inside of /home

Code:

for i in /var/home_volume/*; do ln -s $i /home/; done

But this would have to be repeated every time a new file/dir is added in /var/home_volume, it wouldn't be added to /home automatically. It would be pretty messy though, and how would you handle files with the same name in both locations? You'd be better off thinking of a new way to do things, IMO.

All of the above suggestions are explaining how to make a symlink of /var/home_volume INSIDE of /home, so you would have to go to /home/home_volume to see it. It doesn't sound like that's what you want.