How to make symbolic link to be opened in file manager
 

Hi, everyone!

First of all, thank you for an amazing forum!

I recently downloaded VirtualBox for Arch Linux and I am trying to create a symbolic link so that I can open it from FooFolder in the Thunar file manager from XFCE. However, I cannot for the life of me figure out how to do this.

I ran find / -iname "virtualbox" -exec file {} \; and found a bunch of ELF files and shell scripts. Opening the shell scripts from the CLI opens VirtualBox, but when I make a symbolic link to FooFolder, a dialog box asks me what kind of program I would like to use to open it.

Can anyone help me with this?

I know you can create a link to an app from the XFCE start menu

Basically you select the app from the XFCE start menu as if you wanted to start it, instead of clicking the menu element you drag it and drop it in the thunar open folder window

Which file manager are you using and does the "Open With" dialog display in your file manager have an "Always use this application" (or some such wording) checkbox when you choose and application to open the link?

In my experience, most file managers do.

Are you looking for something like below:

That worked like a charm! Thanks!

I'd be curious to know why, though.

I ran "file virtualbox.desktop" and the output was "UTF-8 Unicode text". I think it is strange that it is not a (soft or hard) link to something else.

At least now I know that I probably have to look for *.desktop files if I want to make shortcuts. That helps me a lot! Thank you all very much for answering!

Yes these shortcuts are plain text files with UTF-8 encoding

File specs:

https://specifications.freedesktop.o...ec-latest.html