Symlink directory from remote machine?

1

Hi everyone, first time poster here.

I keep bunch of raw text lab notes accumulated over the last couple of years on a workstation in a lab. I was wondering if there’s a way to symlink that lab note directory to my laptop/other machines on the same LAN (though full remote capability would be even better), so that I don’t have to constantly scp update or carry USB keys around.

Now, I think ‘ln’ command symbolic links only works on local directory, so I’m also asking if there are alternate solutions that achieves something similar in spirit - low overhead direct read/write to text files on a remote machine directly from the local machine’s directory.

Any lead would be appreciated, thank you!

2

Welcome to the forum!

On the target machine (i.e. server) where you want to write to, install nfs-server or samba, then connect to it from your PC. Or if you don’t want to struggle with the config (it’s not that big of a deal really, particularly not NFS), if you have openssh-server already running, use sshfs (fuse) on your PC to connect to your other system.

Some file managers (like mc, aka midnigt commander) have sftp browsing built-in, but I don’t know if that’s enough (as with sftp you need to copy the files locally, while with sshfs you actually access them locally through a pipe).