Actually this trick also works in Linux or any OS that supports directory symbolic link.

LOOOOONG TIME NO POST ASLKDFJALKSDFJLKASDJF

It's between I have no idea to write about, or I have no time to write stuff, or most of the time, both. I actually experiment out with lots of stuffs lately while taking 3 different courses that closely tied to machine learning. I might gonna go with new posts about my exploration in ML later, probably, maybe.

Symbolic Link

So, what is this? What is a "Link" in operating system? Why it's "Symbolic"?

So basically, every files in your computer is managed by a file system. The file system kinda acts like a library that keep tracks where your file lies physically in the storage, and all the stuffs related to it (metadata). It tracks them as entries of information, and every single thing about the file is described in their own entry.

This makes the difference between file and folder/directory is also marked by the flag in the entry. This gives more opportunities to create more kind of "stuffs".

In most Linux systems, we have file, folder/directory, and link. File marks the physical location where the information stored, while folder just acts as a logical wrapper for the file. In Linux, everything is "file", which figuratively saying that everything is marked as entries in the file system, including directories.

Link on the other hand, while still count as a "file" in the file system, it acts differently by acting as a link between two different locations/files. It kinda acts as "tunnel" between two logical locations. So you can make a fake file that actually just points to other location, like a proxy. This also applies with directory.

The link is only "symbolic", which means this won't store actual information in the physical storage. Although symbolic link (will be referred as symlink) connects two different entries, there are two types of symlinks : hard link and soft link.

The difference only on what stuff it points out. Hard link will point to the physical location of the target, while soft link only points out the entry index. This has other uses, but won't be discussed now.

Directory Symbolic Link

Because we can make symlink to directories, we can link out between directories across places. The kind of link is definitely a soft link because directories has nothing to do with physical location. Making the link is as simple as using `mklink` with two arguments `source` and `target`. The source and target should be qualified file system path.

As I'm using Windows, I'm using this command in Command Prompt. Somehow I can't do this in Powershell, but probably because it has different command.

mkdir /D [source] [target]

So, here is the thing.

Let's say that you have installation in D:/a/b and has directories c,d,e. You have like very little storage left in D: that you want to move it to E:. Sadly, moving this would compromise the already managed directories by the program. Moving the entire installation folder will compromise the registry entries.

This is where directory symlink comes handy, as you can just create a folder in E: and make a certain directory to point to that folder. The only caveat is you need to rename the source into something else as mklink command will create the source entry.

So, let's say that the directory "c" is something you want to move out to E:/other_folder. Rename "c" into "c_other" and use mklink command

mklink /D D:/a/b/c E:/other_folder

We need to put "/D" as the argument because we're working with directories. This command will create a soft symbolic link to that location and the system/program will also think that the "c" folder is still a subdirectory of D:/a/b, although the contents lies in E:/other_folder. It's now only up to moving the contents of "c_other" into E:/other_folder to make it as nothing happens :D

This is an example in Windows, where I moved out my Bluestacks disk image data to other partition because I ran out of storage :'D

Conclussion

There are just lots of stuffs you can do with your system, given that you know how it works and you dare to take the risk. There are already softwares out there that handle the process in more safe and friendly manner, it's up to you on whether or not you know the existence of said concepts or tricks.

Directory Symbolic Link Is Awesome!