Symlink to a URL

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Track title: Quirky Dreamscape Looping

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Chapters
00:00 Symlink To A Url
00:22 Accepted Answer Score 16
00:42 Answer 2 Score 13
01:23 Answer 3 Score 9
02:25 Answer 4 Score 3
02:56 Answer 5 Score 1
04:11 Thank you

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Full question
https://superuser.com/questions/277186/s...

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Content licensed under CC BY-SA
https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/lice...

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Tags
#symboliclink #url

#avk47

ACCEPTED ANSWER

Score 16

It's not possible to create a symlink to an URL. If you can make executables and the target OS is Linux-alike, you can create a file which opens the URL as in:

#!/bin/sh
x-www-browser 'http://example.com/your/link'

ANSWER 2

Score 13

If you are using a GUI desktop in Linux, like Gnome or Unity, you can drag and drop a URL from Firefox and other browsers either onto the desktop or into a folder in the Nautilus file manager. This will create a .desktop file with several lines in it like this one:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Link to Google Calendar
Type=Link
URL=https://www.google.com/calendar/render?pli=1
Icon=text-html

As long as you are in the GUI, you can just double-click on the file to open it into the default Web browser. I do this in Ubuntu to store links to documents in my private Drupal wiki on my machine.

This may work for KDE, xfce, and other desktop managers, but I haven't tried it.

ANSWER 3

Score 9

You want an automatic URL link, stored in a file in your file system, to open.

The way to do this is with a minimalist .HTML file. For example, to take you to the Google home page, place the following code in a file named Google.HTML:

<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Google automatic redirect</title>
    <meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; url=http://www.google.com/" />
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>For older browsers, click Redirect</h1>
    <p><a href="http://www.google.com/">Redirect</a></p>
  </body>
</html>

When you open (i.e double click) on this file, the OS will open your default browser (e.g. Firefox) and render this little HTML file, which has a URL redirect in the header, which in turn will automatically open the URL in the redirect.

This can be adapted to take you to the online file as per your question.

The URL contains the protocol (e.g. HTTP), so just make sure that it's in there. To be more minimalist, you can omit the <title> and <h1> lines.

I tried the other answers on this page with Ubuntu 16.04 without success, but this solution works.

ANSWER 4

Score 3

It's not possible to link to a HTTP location. You might be able to mount the location of this file via WebDAV to your system and link to the local mount, but this only works if it's configured to get exported via WebDAV..
But if you want to read the file (I think you are trying to do so), you anyhow have to download the content (even if it would be possible to create such a link). So I recommend to simply download it.

ANSWER 5

Score 1

For ease of use, I wrote a script to generate bash-links like Lekensteyn suggested in the accepted answer. This is also able to properly handle arguments containing spaces or other special characters.

Making it runnable makes things even more handy. Run it like $ linkscript.sh "http://example.com/your/link" "YourLinkFile.sh". (Depending on your link and file name, this usually also works without the quotes ". As a rule of thumb, it is always safer with quotes.)

#!/bin/bash
printf '#!/bin/bash\nxdg-open %q\n' "$1" > "$2" && chmod +x -- "$2" #Overwrite existing file with > instead of appending with >> 
chmod +x $2 #Makes the generated script executeable

Thanks also for Lekensteyn's former comment suggesting the use of printf %q format specifier to ensure that special characters are properly quoted in case the URLs containing single quotes. This also simplified/shortened the code a little. The suggested script then uses the single printf line instead of the previous two-liner, which can be seen in the edit history. Thanks also to altermetax' comment for pointing to use xdg-open rather than x-www-browser to be compatible with most distributions.

Note about the shebang in the code:

You have to use #!/bin/bash instead of #!/bin/sh to get the correct version of printf and don't cause printf: %q: invalid directive as per this Q/A. Thanks to M.T for pointing out this improvement!