@bkuhn
Well it could be an option to ln, and I for one would love it and make it the default in mine.

Please submit that patch to coreutils upstream as non default behaviour. You can make it a per user default using environment variables and/or shell aliases.
@mjw @vagrantc

@collinfunk
That bug fails to notice that it is using confusing language in the documentation.

ln TARGET LINK_NAME

the target can reasonably be assumed to be the file that is created. But in the case of ln, it's the target *of* the file that is created.

I think that is where my confusion stems from, and I think this language should be updated.

I can't quite think of a good replacement for TARGET, though.
@bkuhn @mjw

@mattskala
Anyone who tries to parse the ls output for symlink status rather than using https://manpages.debian.org/trixie/coreutils/stat.1.en.html (and doesn't do so in a shell with potential output-changing environment variables cleared) deserves for their scripts to be broken.

ls is an interactive program, its output should not be considered parseable.
@bkuhn @vagrantc @mjw

@mattskala
Oh no. That was discussed in a bug report that this thread links to, but that's a terrible idea.

This is about adding an *option* to ls to swap the symlink and what that points to around in the ls output.
@bkuhn @vagrantc @mjw

@mattskala
Oops, yes, that was a typo. Sorry.
@bkuhn @vagrantc @mjw