Niki Tonsky
It’s always source to destination, from -> to, before -> after. Also known as the most natural order, with timeline going to the right. In this picture it’s deliberately confusing because they call source “target”. Link that you create is a target. Don’t thank me 8 comments
iliazeus
@nikitonsky because of this, I often just use `cp -s`, which has the same "from-to" order that regular `cp` has. `cp -s` might be a GNU extension though, idk how widely it's available.
Dmitry Mazin
@nikitonsky thanks for the explanation, maybe it’ll finally stick for me. the gnu manpage calls the original file the target but the bsd manage uses it to refer to the symbolic link 😂😫
Marian
@nikitonsky The natural way would be an arrow going from left to right pointing to the the thing that the link links to. Compare this to a pointer in programming. It is always visualized as an arrow going from the address of the pointer to the thing it's pointing at.
Scott Perry
@nikitonsky what really helped me remember the order was learning that the last parameter is optional, and only one of them can be. 
re-curse
@nikitonsky unfortunately in many assembly languages the Intel syntax (wrong order) is used. And it always makes me cry.
kalvn
@nikitonsky On Windows it is the opposite actually 😅 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/mklink mklink link target where target is the source. |
Gregory's Server
@nikitonsky this just conflates source as in "source of truth" with source as in "your starting point"