Symbolic link on a USB stick automatically adding extra characters upon opening

Question

I'm trying to create a relative symbolic link to an html file. Both the symbolic link and the file are to be stored on a USB stick (i want it to open on any computer).

I successfully created the symbolic link by doing this: me@laptop: /media/administrator/2FE50BF119A67FE4$ ln -s bin/www/index.html "Khan Academy"

Now, when I click on that link, I get the following message in the browser:

Firefox cannot find the file at /bin/www/index.htmlZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

WHERE in the WORLD did all those z's come from, and how can I get rid of them???????????

I've been trying to get this to work for days, I formatted a bunch of USB drives to nfts (which took forever) just so that I could create the symbolic link on the drive, and now it's not working!!

I suspect it's a bug in firefox on lubuntu. It worked perfectly on another computer running ubuntu.

Answer 1

ln -s bin/www/index.html "Khan Academy"

only works if you are positioned at the right place, as it's a relative link. Are you sure you want to do that? (I suspect you want /bin/www/index.html)

Check, after you made the symbolic link, where Khan Academy points to with:

ls -al "Khan Academy"

I'm quite sure Firefox is the same in lubuntu as on the other machine.

Answer 2

The mount point for the USB drive could be different on different machines, so you need to use a relative path. Assuming the bin directory is in root of your USB drive (/media/administrator/2FE50BF119A67FE4), the just do ln -s ./bin/www/index.html "Khan Academy" from the root of the USB. However, you still may not see what you expect in your browser depending on how index.html was written.