[hnarn]

> I think of it like `cp`. Source to destination, where destination is the soft link.

That doesn't make sense to me. The way I think about cp is "copy this, and put it over here". If you think about symlinks that way, you mix it up.

When you say "source to destination, where destination is the soft link", that makes it more confusing for me, because if you consider the symlink that is being created as the "destination" (which at least is the intuitive way to think about it for me, but I suppose it's individual), you actually end up with:

# cp [source] [destination]

# ln -s [destination] [source]

Where "source" is "the new thing that should be created".

Since I seem incapable of getting out of this way of thinking about sources and destinations, my rule of thumb is that when creating a symlink, you always decide where it should point first. Not intuitive perhaps, but this time I've made the mistake so many times it kinda sticks.

[throwaway5d097]

If it was a hard link, I suppose my way of thinking about it would make more sense, since all hard links are as valid, pretty much the same. That is, after running

  ln /some/file /other/file

/some/file and /other/file are hard links. So in this case ln is just copying a hard link, while afaik cp would be copying data, making a hard link pointing to the new data. In userspace? That seems to be what's happening here - https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/bin/cp/utils.c

This is made a bit more confusing by the differences in man pages. For GNU ln, it's shown as ln TARGET LINK_NAME, but for OpenBSD, ln source [target]. But the usage is pretty much the same?

[mtm]

how about like this:

# cp [existing-thing] [new-thing]

# mv [existing-thing] [new-thing]

# ln -s [existing-thing] [new-thing]