It may help to have a little background in what I'm trying to do.

I have files a, b, c and d. They're all relatively large and are served up by a static web server optimized for this purpose. I can get requests that look like this:

/abcd
/ad
/bacdac
...

Each request is basically a request for a concatenation of the files in the order of the letters. The list of possible requests is finite, but large enough that disk space will run out very quickly and be very expensive if I create all possible files via concatenation.

Is there a way to create a pointer file like abcd that is essentially a multi-file symlink that first points to a then to be then to c then to d? So if the contents of the files were as follows:

a: hello
b: there
c: whats
d: up

abcd would be "hellotherewhatsup" and db would be "upthere" and so on. Again, I don't want to create new concatenated files, I want to have some sort of multi-file symlink.

nice idea, but no, no such thing. If you are after fundamentally dynamic content, then you should look at creating it dynamically, a simple php script can provide what you're after assuming these files are only pulled via a web server. You can also easily use mod_rewrite to convert something like /files/abcd into /scripts/filejoinything.php?files=abcd to restore a very simple uri.

Yea, I was hoping for some system-level solution instead of something at the web server level. These files are requested often enough there's a cpu load to consider when executing a program to do the job. That said, it looks like if there's nothing like it, that's my only solution.

No.

Symlinks are like windows shortcuts that just link to another file, and cannot perform concatenation.

for your example to work you should probably consider the paste, join or cat commands

paste has the ability to join the lines of each file, separated by a tab by default but any delimiter can be used

join links two files together on lines with common data (like the sql join command)

and cat actually stands for con{cat}enate.

eg "cat a b" would produce
hello
there

for more information:

type either of the following for help and examples in your shell:

man paste
man join
man cat

hope that helps

Kind Regards

Richard Forth
_____________________________________
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