Brendan Dawes
The Art of Form and Code

Creating a symbolic link to another file or directory

In the process of rendering a large number of files in Houdini I often need to use the 16TB external drive rather than my Mac’s internal drive. However I have a lot of directories set up in the Houdini project folder such as geo / sim etc so I’d rather point to those paths from inside Houdini rather than an external drive.

To get the best of both worlds I create a symbolic link, which is a kind of like an Alias in a Mac, but is machine readable. To do that I open up a terminal and use the ln command:

ln -s /path/to/directory/on/external/drive/geo /path/to/houdini/project/directory

This will create a directory (in this instance called geo) inside for example my Houdini project directory, but it actually resides on my large external drive.