How to Create a Symbolic Link to a Mounted Volume

[Markus Schönhaber]

Derek Broughton:
> Markus Schönhaber wrote:
> 
>> Dom Incollingo:
>>
>>> I mounted a home directory from another computer via sftp.  The directory
>>> is mounted as:
>>>
>>>             sftp://dji@linux/home/dji.
>>> I tried to make a symbolic link to this directory by running  the command
>>>
>>>           ln -s sftp://dji@linux/home/dji  anotherHome
>> You can't create usable symlinks pointing to somewhere outside the
>> filesystem tree.
> 
> Of course, you really can,

No, you can't (notice the word "useful").

> but the other filesystem must be _mounted_ into 
> your hierarchy.

Which means that it's *not* *outside* filesystem tree any more.

>  My /etc/fstab has a number of entries like:
> //DOMAIN/SHARE /home/derek/DOM_MOUNT cifs \
>    noauto,user,credentials=/home/derek/.cred,rw 0 0
> 
> and after I "mount ~/DOM_MOUNT" I can treat it like a local mount - 
> including making symlinks to files in its own filesystem.

I already gave the OP one possible solution to create a symlink that is
actually usable pointing to the sftp server's file system.

>> Out of curiosity: why do you want to do that?
> 
> Because you can? :-)

OK, valid explanation. But it still leaves me curious.

> Seems to me that a great deal of effort has been put into both KDE & Gnome to 
> make it possible to treat remotely "accessed" (as opposed to explicitly 
> mounted) filesystems as if they're local.  
> 
> The problem in this case is that, as Markus points out, it's something that 
> _Gnome_ can do (and I'd just like to mention that KDE has been able to do it 
> for much longer!) but if you're working in the CLI at the level of "ln", 
> then you're working at the same level as "mount", and you need the filesystem 
> explicitly mounted before you can do things like that.

Well, as I already pointed out in my previous post, GVFS creates
something that is actually usable as a target for ln -s. Although typing
"sftp://<something>" into Nautilus' location bar doesn't really mount
the remote filesystem separately, it's made accessible through a folder
below ~/.gvfs which itself is indeed a mount point.
But that's just nitpicking: I agree that it may not bee too desirable in
the long run to rely on a mix of GUI and command line tools.
I'm too lazy to check now, but I'd be surprised if no-one had written
something (for example using FUSE) that really mounts a sftp filesystem,
which might be a more adequate tool for the job.

Regards
  mks