Is it possible to create a symbolic link to an executable that executes it with a certain option/argument?I know a workaround would be to create a bash script in one of the PATH directories but can I achieve it somehow with a symbolic link?EDIT: Thanks for the answers, in my case an alias wouldn't do the job because i'm looking for a way to start matlab from dmenu and at least on arch matlab is only invokable from a terminal at first. Since dmenu does not consider aliases it wouldn't work .. i should have made my problem more clear.
Symbolic link with option
symlink;options;ln
No, a symbolic link is a type of file that references the path of another file.Now, if you do:ln -s /bin/cat fooAnd invoke foo as:$./foo -A /proc/self/cmdline./foo^@-A^@/proc/self/cmdline^@You'll notice that the first argument that cat/foo received was ./foo and not cat. So, in a way, through that symlink, we've had cat receive a different first argument. That's probably not what you had in mind for your first argument though.Using a shell script wrapper is the typical way to address it. You don't need to use bash for that though. Your system's standard sh will be more than enough for that:#! /bin/sh -exec /path/to/my/executable --extra-option $@Other options include defining an alias or function in your ~/.bashrc/~/.zshrc... for it