This occurred because you already had something in your home directory called "Downloads" - the ln
command is smart enough not to write over it, so instead created the symlink within it.
If you're starting from scratch you can mv ~/Downloads ~/Volumes/Data/
; if you've already successfully copied your Downloads directory you can simply delete the old one in your home directory: rm -Rf ~/Downloads
.
After that your original ln
command should work. You shouldn't need to prefix it with sudo
:
ln -s /Volumes/Data/Downloads ~/Downloads
Or, as fd0 suggested, instead of using rm
you could use ln -s -f
option to unlink the directory. Thus creating the desired results:
ln -s -f /Volumes/Data/Downloads ~/Downloads