How do I Symlink files to combine them like so?

[Poet129]

Is it possible to link to another files contents within a different file? Like this...

 

Text1.txt

Contains

"Example Words"

 

Text2.txt

Contains

"Text2 Example"

 

Text.txt

shows this if a program reads it, and if edits are made it goes to the file the text belongs to.

"Example Words

Text2 Example"

[toxsickcity]

I could be wrong,

 

But I always understood symlink and hardlinks as basically shortcuts.

 

eg:

if you have file.txt on Drive C but an APP requires it to be on drive D use SYMlink to make a linked copy of the file

 

I use symlinks for the apple backup folder on C drive to stop waste space of SSDs for customers..

 

Hardlinks I think are simnilar but to stay on Drive C.. just duplicate the item without using more disk space... as example

[Poet129]

1 minute ago, toxsickcity said:

I could be wrong,

 

But I always understood symlink and hardlinks as basically shortcuts.

 

eg:

if you have file.txt on Drive C but an APP requires it to be on drive D use SYMlink to make a linked copy of the file

 

I use symlinks for the apple backup folder on C drive to stop waste space of SSDs for customers..

 

Hardlinks I think are simnilar but to stay on Drive C.. just duplicate the item without using more disk space... as example

Yes but I'n looking to do it on a file content basis like explained below.

 

5 minutes ago, Poet129 said:

Is it possible to link to another files contents within a different file? Like this...

 

Text1.txt

Contains

"Example Words"

 

Text2.txt

Contains

"Text2 Example"

 

Text.txt

shows this if a program reads it, and if edits are made it goes to the file the text belongs to.

"Example Words

Text2 Example"

 

[dalekphalm]

So you want a text file where it's contents are actually two different separate text files?

 

That's not a symlink - in fact, I don't think there's a way to do that with text files.

 

You can do that with certain other file types, like HTML, where you can have nested files.

[Poet129]

3 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

So you want a text file where it's contents are actually two different separate text files?

 

That's not a symlink - in fact, I don't think there's a way to do that with text files.

 

You can do that with certain other file types, like HTML, where you can have nested files.

This what I'm looking to do. I wasn't sure if there was a way but I thought someone might know.

[Sauron]

No, links are a file system feature and are independent of a file's contents. If you want to concatenate files like that you can make a script that checks for changes on those files and updates another file that contains the contents of both - then have that script run periodically as a service either through systemd or something else like cron.

[Eigenvektor]

Not possible, as @Sauron said, unless you come up with your own file format and write an editor that is capable of editing such files. It would not longer be plain text file though (it could still contain text, but it would need some form of meta-language to define links).

 

However, your idea has one pitfall. Let's say your files look like this:

Text-A.txt

Content-A

Text-B.txt

Content-B

 

If you open your "combined" file, you expect to see this:

Text.txt

Content-A
Content-B

 

What happens if you edit the file to look like this:

Content-A
Something new
Content-B

 

Should "Something new" be added to the end of Text-A or to the beginning of Text-B?