UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

I still don't understand what the problem is with using ln -s with wildcards . I've what you have said several times with no luck.

Well, the bottom line is that your command will fail with an error message if you have more than one version of JDK/JRE installed. If you have no error message, it should just work as expected.

Should you have more queries, please be more specific. Sentences like "It doesn't seem like it is working when I use wildcards." cannot lead anyone to understand what your problem is.

Wildcards don't do what you think they do.

A symlink is just a special kind of file whose contents are one literal filename. They're handled by the kernel, directly. When you open one, the kernel sees the contents and goes "hmm, this is a symlink to /usr/java/default/lib/i386/libnpjp2.s, I need to go open that instead". The filename is literal. A * won't be taken to be a wildcard, just a literal part of the name -- it is possible to create files and dirs named *...

Wildcards are handled by the shell, before you run ln. If multiple JRE's exist, your wildcards feed the whole list of things into ln, which isn't what you want -- it will try to create multiple links, like so:

Code:

$ mkdir e
$ touch a b c d
$ ln ../a ../b ../c ../d e # a b c d are links to be made, e is destination dir
$ ls -l e
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 tyler users 4 Sep 28 08:59 a -> ../a
lrwxrwxrwx 1 tyler users 4 Sep 28 08:59 b -> ../b
lrwxrwxrwx 1 tyler users 4 Sep 28 08:59 c -> ../c
lrwxrwxrwx 1 tyler users 4 Sep 28 08:59 d -> ../d
$

When you force the link contents a literal * character, that won't help you because the kernel is not a shell, and won't expand * characters.

What, exactly did you try, and in what way did it not work?