Need help in terminal on mac leopard, please!!

[Tiffany]

Hi, I'm a goober

I also posted this in the mac section, hope the double up is ok. figured i might reach more terminal experienced people here?? I have stuffed up access to a folder on my external drive using the ln command in terminal, i need to undo the link but dont know how.

I have just recently purchased a combo drive mac mini (with all the standard specs, no extras), and have been making a few minor changes to  set it up as a media centre.

One thing that I wanted to do was change the default directory for all my movies from the pre-designated movies directory on my mac internal hdd, to a folder also called Movies on my western digital my book external 500g drive. The drive is formatted as NTFS but i have installed a patch so it is read/write in leopard.

Being new to mac i did not know that i could simply make an alias for my external movies folder an put it in the mac movies folder so that i could access those files through front row (using dvd assist), which is all i'm trying to do.

So, i did a bit of digging on the web and found someone who had a posted a bit of terminal code that removed the mac movies directory and replaced it with whatever directory you wanted to use instead.
Gave it a try even though its a bit over my head, and needless to say i have stuffed it up.

so now, the movies directory on my mac hdd remains completely usable and unchanged (phew), but my external hdd movies folder is stuffed. there is a folder there called movies, but there is  nothing in it. My original movies folder had about 200g of stuff in it, which according to the system information for the drive must still be on the drive, coz the space is still taken up. It seems to me that i have just 'broken' the directory. I guess that a new, empty directory called movies has been placed on the drive that has nothing in it, but since it has the same name as my original folder full of stuff, the latter has become inaccessible even though the files remain on the drive.

Sorry for the long post and stupidity. does anyone here know enough about terminal to help me fix my mess? i'm happy to provide more info (e.g the command i put into terminal) if anyone thinks it may help. I'll take any adivce i can get.

Thanks heaps
Tiffany

[KenJackson]

I didn't follow all of that, and I don't use a Mac.  But I'm guessing you are using a Bash shell for the "terminal".  Is that right?

Did you use the ln command or the ln -s command?

If you used ln, you made hard links.  You can verify that two entries are hard links to the same file with the ls -i command, which shows you the inode number.  If two files have the same inode number, you can delete either one with the rm command and the other one will not be affected.

If you used the ln -s command, you just made a symbolic link, which you can safely delete with rm. (But don't delete the file or directory it points to unless you want it to be gone.) You can verify a file is a symbolic link with the ls -l command.