<story><title>I always forget the argument order of the `ln -s` command</title><url>http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1qt0z/ln_s_d1_d2_am_i_the_only_person_who_gets_this_the</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>terra_t</author><text>I used to have this problem.  Then I realized that if I want to really copy a file,  I type&lt;p&gt;$cp file_from file_to&lt;p&gt;and that&lt;p&gt;$ln -s link_from link_to&lt;p&gt;has a very similar effect to the cp command above.  I haven&apos;t messed this up ever since.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jackowayed</author><text>This phrasing confused me more.&lt;p&gt;`$ ln -s link_from link_to` would imply the reverse behavior. How does a symlink point from the actual file to the thing-that-looks-like-a-file-but-is-really-a-symlink? The file doesn&apos;t even know whether there are symlinks pointing to it.&lt;p&gt;Applying your definitions of &quot;link from&quot; and &quot;link to&quot;, this:&lt;p&gt;&amp;#60;a href=&quot;&lt;a href=&quot;http://google.com/&amp;#62;Google&amp;#60;/a&amp;#62&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://google.com/&amp;#62;Google&amp;#60;/a&amp;#62&lt;/a&gt;;&lt;p&gt;creates a link from google.com to the hyperlink on your site.&lt;p&gt;I find the top reddit comment:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    cp existing new
    ln -s existing new
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
much, much more useful. You want to create a new link pointing to an existing file, which has the same ordering as when you use cp to create a new file with the content of an existing file.</text></comment>
<story><title>I always forget the argument order of the `ln -s` command</title><url>http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1qt0z/ln_s_d1_d2_am_i_the_only_person_who_gets_this_the</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>terra_t</author><text>I used to have this problem.  Then I realized that if I want to really copy a file,  I type&lt;p&gt;$cp file_from file_to&lt;p&gt;and that&lt;p&gt;$ln -s link_from link_to&lt;p&gt;has a very similar effect to the cp command above.  I haven&apos;t messed this up ever since.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>brown9-2</author><text>The problem with &quot;from&quot; and &quot;to&quot; is - which is the from and which is the to?&lt;p&gt;Is the &quot;from&quot; the file/dir I want to copy &quot;to&quot; a link?&lt;p&gt;Or is the &quot;from&quot; the name of a link I want to point &quot;to&quot;?&lt;p&gt;The dual meaning of some terms that the concept of links and making links creates causes a lot of this confusion, IMHO. Are we using terminology that refers to the act of creating the link or that refers to the direction of the link?&lt;p&gt;Similarly, I don&apos;t think it helps that the usage text and manpage for ln refer to &quot;target&quot;s.&lt;p&gt;(I know what you mean by your examples but I wanted to share my pet theory as to why this is always so hard to remember)</text></comment>