Odd Thing About Symlinks

I refactored a site recently and rather than having a bunch of files with identical headers and footers, I created an index.php file with conditionals to create the meta data and then include the content. To preserve the existing file structure, I just created symlinks to the index.php file. So I did something like this:

ln -s index.php oldname1.php
ln -s index.php oldname2.php

This works great and is pretty easy to implement. (Yes there are other ways to do it.)

I ran into a problem when I tried to create symlinks in some subdirectories to prevent the “You don’t have permission to access /include.php/ on this server.” error message. I turns out that you have to be in the subdirectory where you want the alias to reside. This works:

cd Guides
ln -s ../manuals/index.php index.php

This does not:

cd manuals
ln -s index.php Guides/index.php