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senjin

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Registered: 2006-09-15

Posts: 181

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[solved] home partition -> long path problem

I have a separate partition for home. However, I want to use it with all systems on my computer. I know that it is bad idea to share the same ~ directory by several systems, so I created a separate directory for each system. So it looks like this:

home partition contains:
arch/antek (my username is antek)

it is mounted in
/mnt/home

and /home is a symlink pointing to:
/mnt/home/arch

Basically it works, the problem is that xfce4 randomly uses one or another path. So sometimes I open my home directory in thunar (it shows /home/antek), I go to some directory (/home/antek/directory), I rightclick to "open in terminal", and terminal shows me /mnt/home/arch/antek/directory. This is a bit of a problem, because long paths don't fit well in the terminal window, as well as some programs I use have problems when the path is too long.

Is there any way to force my system to use always "/home/antek" and never "/mnt/home/arch/antek"? How do you do this? I'm certain many of you use several distros on one machine.

Last edited by senjin (2010-11-11 17:34:15)

xvello

Member

Registered: 2010-05-15

Posts: 81

Website

Re: [solved] home partition -> long path problem

I don't think what you want is possible with ln -s (that's just the way it works).
You should use mount --bind for this purpose. It allows you to remount a directory (/mnt/home/arch) in another directory (/mnt/home), this being totally transparent to the applications.

senjin

Member

Registered: 2006-09-15

Posts: 181

Website

Re: [solved] home partition -> long path problem

I didn't know about "bind" option. It looks good, I will give it a try... thanks!

...and it works!

Last edited by senjin (2010-11-11 17:34:31)