Need BASH script help

[Joel Oliver]

Brad De Vries wrote:
> On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 8:25 PM, Joel Oliver <joelol75 at verizon.net> wrote:
>   
>> Hello, I was wondering if there's anyone who can help me with my problem.
>>
>> OK.... I have a huge directory of movies (1200+) all in one directory
>> and I wanted to "divide" them up...  Smarty me comes up with a great
>> idea... symbolic links...  Now it would take forever to go into the
>> terminal and ln -s every file so I discovered konqueror does this with a
>> drag and drop... Great!  So dragging and dropping away I sorted all my
>> movies alphebetically, by release date, by actors/actresses...  All was
>> well except one BIG thing...
>>
>> I play them on my neuros OSD and mount them via NFS.   Konqueror really
>> botched this as it created absolute path links and I needed relative
>> paths....like it did this:
>>
>> my movies are in /big/sda/moviesa/
>>
>> my OSD mounts this in /mnt/media/nfs
>>
>> so the path after the mount is /mnt/media/nfs/sda/moviesa
>>
>> my sorted symbolic links are in /big/sda/Sorted/Alphebetical/A/movie.avi
>> and these are linked like /big/sda/moviesa/movie.avi which is great on
>> the computer but the path is wrong on the OSD.  I thought I could
>> 'trick' the OSD with a symbolic link right in the root of the drive, but
>> this area is solid state and won't let me write to it... So the big ?:
>>
>> Is there an easy recursive way to recurse through a whole directory
>> structure, chop off the /big/sda and replace it with a relative ../../..
>>
>> If I link it as ../../../moviesa/movie.avi it works on both machines....
>> But that's alot of files to do one-by-one and I'm kinda stumped...
>>
>> Any quick ideas?  I realize this will work with every file as long as I
>> keep all my links on the 3rd layer... otherwise I would need more or
>> less "..'s"      :)
>>
>> Thanks in advance,
>> Joel.
>>     
>
> Actually, why do you have to use symbolic links?  If you use a hard
> link then the file's data is accessible directly from the filename --
> no link traversal required.
>
> Just a thought, albeit a good one.  :-)
>
> Brad.
>
>   
I thought it was a big no-no to use hard links....   Kinda like 
telnetting in as root, storing compressed reiserfs .img files on a 
reiser partition, using special characters [/<> in fileneames... I know 
all the above can be done but shouldn't for some reason or another...  I 
think I heard something about hard links are bad but ... I don't know why