LINUX: Link all files from one to another director

Question

I want to link ( ln -s ) all files that are in /mnt/usr/lib/ into /usr/lib/

There are lots of file, how to do it fast? :)

Answer 1

ln -s /mnt/usr/lib/* /usr/lib/

I guess, this belongs to superuser, though.

Answer 2

GNU cp has an option to create symlinks instead of copying.

cp -rs /mnt/usr/lib /usr/

Note this is a GNU extension not found in POSIX cp.

Answer 3

ln -s /mnt/usr/lib/* /usr/lib/

Answer 4

The posted solutions will not link any hidden files. To include them, try this:

cd /usr/lib
find /mnt/usr/lib -maxdepth 1 -print "%P\n" | while read file; do ln -s "/mnt/usr/lib/$file" "$file"; done

If you should happen to want to recursively create the directories and only link files (so that if you create a file within a directory, it really is in /usr/lib not /mnt/usr/lib), you could do this:

cd /usr/lib
find /mnt/usr/lib -mindepth 1 -depth -type d -printf "%P\n" | while read dir; do mkdir -p "$dir"; done
find /mnt/usr/lib -type f -printf "%P\n" | while read file; do ln -s "/mnt/usr/lib/$file" "$file"; done