Creating a Symbolic Link with ln -s What Comes First?

One thing I've had to google more times than I'd like to admit is the path argument order for the ln command. What comes first in the ln -s command on linux or Mac? So I thought I'd write a little blog entry for future me to find.

Here's an example:

ln -s /real/path /linked/path

To answer my own question, you put the existing path first (source file), then the link path (target file) you want to create second.

A good way to try to remember this is that it is the same order as the cp command if you were to copy a file from one path to a new path, you always put the existing file path first. The same goes for ln, but unless you create symbolic links every day you'll probably forget this by the next time you need to create one.

It doesn't matter if you are running Mac, Linux, Ubuntu, RedHat the syntax will always be ln -s source target

ln: No such file or directory Error

Recently when attempting to create a symbolic link from one folder to a new linked folder, I received this error:

ln: /linked/path/: No such file or directory

That seamed like a rather odd error since that linked path was the link I was attempting to create, of course it doesn't exist. This led me to immediately think I mixed up the order of the target and source paths, but I did have them in the correct order. The cause of that error for me was simply that I put a trailing slash on the linked path. Removing that trailing slash fixed the problem for me.