How can I quickly create aliases with absolute paths?

Question

I often make mistakes in making aliases:

ln -S $Personal/Books $Buy/Books      (1)

Instead, I have to write the whole path to get the last command working:

ln -S /Users/user/something/.../Books /Users/user/something/.../Books     (2)

I would really love to get something similar to (1) working. It is so time consuming to do (2). How can I quickly create absolute paths for aliases?

Answer 1

I assume in your example the paths Personal and Buy are both directories in your home directory. Then you can create a relative symlink by typing

cd Buy
ln -s ../Personal/Books Books