What I’m trying to do
I have a file server-based document library and an Obsidian Vault that I want to access regularly from Obsidian markdown documents on both Linux and Mac machines (and sometimes Windows machines). The document library is at /DocLib and the vault at /DocLib/Vault. The DocLib folder is symlinked from my home directory on both Linux and MacOS, but to reference the home directory MacOS (like Windows) uses /Users/ and Linux uses /home/. Previously, I was able to create a symlink /Users under Linux pointing to /home, so that in Obsidian I could create file links like this:
(<file:///Users//DocLib/).
This workaround only worked if I made a symlink under Linux; the reverse scheme under MacOS never worked. But in this way, one link in a Markdown note would work under all three OSs.
I just upgraded my Linux to Linux Mint 22.1 and installed Obsidian 1.8.4 from the Ubuntu repository and this workaround stopped working. So did every other attempt to create a consistent file address formula that would work across operating systems.
Things I have tried
I searched “external file links” and similar terms but none seemed to match my problem.
- I tried creating a MacOS consistent route to my document library under Linux by symlinking /Users to /home; making a directory /Users and symlinking /Users/ to /home/; similar approaches, even creating symlinks directly from / to the document library did not work.
- In each case, I tried every combination of ownership and permissions using chown and chmod - even the most open permissions did not work.
- More testing identified that no markdown file links via (<file:///Users/… >) worked at all, for directory or non-directory targets, even when the equivalent (<file:///home/…>) links worked fine.
- Many of these approaches worked in Linux itself: for example, the /Users → /home symlink worked fine at operating system level. I could list files either way using ‘ls’ and edit a text file either way using ‘vi’. It was only Obsidian markdown file links that stopped working, which suggests that there has been a change in Obsidian itself.
- Trying to use direct addressing of the server shares from the different machines did not work because the server addresses are different under Linux (e.g. /mnt/… versus /Volumes/…).
After spending some hours on this I’ve drawn a blank. I can contemplate scripting a systematic changes to the file paths in all the .md files in my Vault (there are a lot) - but I cannot find a formula that works across operating systems - or even discover why it has stopped working.