How do I automatically create links to directories?

Question

What is the easiest/quickest way to share files among different users?

I would like each user to have access to the same music and pictures directories. Creating symbolic links seems tedious as I would have to manually add them after I created each user.

Is there a way to automatically create links to these directories for each user?

Answer 1

You could write use below mentioned shell script to create links for those directories for existing users and could use skel so that links are automatically created when new users are added.

#!/bin/bash

# GENERATES ALL THE USER HOMES
USERSHOMES="$(cat /etc/passwd | grep home | grep -v /bin/false | cut -d: -f6)"

# THIS IS THE LINK NAME
LINK="music-dir"

# LINK DIRECTORY TO ALL HOMES
for h in $USERSHOMES
do

   # WHERE YOU WANT TO COPY TO
   _dir="${h}/Desktop"
   if [ -d "$_dir" ]
   then
      ln -s "/media/music" "$_dir/$LINK"
   fi
done  

Tested on my system.