Creating shortcuts

[Paul Howarth]

Nat Gross wrote:
> Paul Howarth wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, 2005-03-09 at 22:14 -0300, Leandro Melo wrote:
>>  
>>
> <snip>
> 
>> Other people have answered your question regarding shortcuts, but I
>> thought I'd mention that if you're installing non-RPM software on to
>> your system, the best place for it to go is /usr/local/bin, not /usr
>> (ideally, /usr/local would be a separate partition too, so that you can
>> do a fresh install of the system, completely discarding the contents
>> of /usr but still keeping /usr/local the way it is). Putting things
>> in /usr runs the risk of them being overwritten by a subsequent
>> installation of an RPM-based package (which almost invariably install
>> into /usr).
>>
>> Paul.
>>  
>>
> Two questions, please.
> 1. Is /opt as safe?

I think so; I don't think any Red Hat/Fedora packages put anything in 
/opt. You might find that commercial packages put things there though, 
if you use any of those.

> 2. re: shortcuts. How do I get my link to display the true path? I have 
> a symlink to /usr/share/xxx. When I browse this (also at a terminal 
> prompt) , it shows the path as "/home/nat/Desktop/theLinkName", but many 
> times I prefer to have it show the true path, "/usr/share/xxx".

Re: appearance on the desktop; no idea (I never create shortcuts on the 
desktop myself - just out of habit rather than because I think it's a 
bad thing to do [which I don't]). At the terminal prompt, if you use the 
"-L" option to "ls", it'll show you details of the file being linked to 
rather than the details of the link itself.

Paul.