Linux – symbolic link to a folder whose parent directory does not have execute permission

I

want to make a soft link from one directory to another, and the directory I am trying to access I have read and executed. However, its parent directory I don’t have execute permission.

Is there a way to make a soft link to the directory I want without giving me execute access to the parent directory?

Here’s the code I used:

ln -s /home/dir1/dir2/desired_directory symbolic_link_name

The link just appears red on a gray background.

Thank you.

Although this is not possible for symbolic links, you can do it using mount –bind. Note that if the focus is on circumventing security, then this can be a very bad idea.

Your command is

mount --bind /home/dir1/dir2/desired_directory mount_dir

There are a couple of issues to be aware of:

• The target directory must exist before mount_dir (as with any mount point).
• Root access is required to execute mount commands
• Unless you add the corresponding line in /etc/fstab, the created “link” does not persist across restarts
• If the source directory contains mounted file systems, these will not be transferred to the destination. The mount point appears as an empty directory.
• Using mount –bind may be considered bad practice because most programs do not know that “link” is not a standard directory. For example, it allows creating loops in the directory tree, putting any tree parsing application (think “ls -R”) into a possible infinite loop.
• Can be dangerous when used in conjunction with recursive delete operations. See e.g. Yet another warning about mount –bind and rm -rf