Make A Symbolic Link to Your iCloud Drive

November 25, 2018 | apple |

If you use iCloud Drive to store documents and also use the terminal quite a bit, it might be handy to add a symbolic link to iCloud into your home directory. This will allow you to easily make your way around your iCloud files from a terminal.

You can do this with these steps:

Open up a terminal
Run the following command

ln -s "/Users/$USER/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs" iCloud

Note: the quotes above are important since there is a space in the directory path.

If you run ls, you will now see a folder called iCloud which is a symbolic link to your iCloud drive.

Next time that you need to scp a file from your iCloud Drive to some server, rather than googling the path to your iCloud folder, you can simply cd into it and go to town.

Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on bluesky, mastodon, or via email.

Check out some more stuff to read down below.

Most popular posts this month

Recent Favorite Blog Posts

This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.

A Year Of Vibes from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
Pluralistic: A perfect distillation of the social uselessness of finance (18 Dec 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Moving from WordPress to Substack from charity.wtf
Grow, Like a Tree Not a Cancer from Jim Nielsen’s Blog
Pluralistic: All the books I reviewed in 2025 (02 Dec 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
DEP-18: A proposal for Git-based collaboration in Debian from Optimized by Otto
[RIDGELINE] No Phones in The Ten-don Shop from Craig Mod — Writer + Photographer
Open design: the opportunity design students didn’t know they were missing from Ubuntu blog

Articles from blogs I follow around the net

Year 10

I distinctly remember waking up early, on January 1st, 2017, going downstairs with my laptop, making myself some coffee, and coding what ended up being the first iteration of this blog. I wanted to write weekly updates to hold myself accountable. …

via Manuel Moreale — Everything Feed January 1, 2026

Pluralistic: The Post-American Internet (01 Jan 2026)

Today's links The Post-American Internet: My speech from Hamburg's Chaos Communications Congress. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Error code 451; Public email address Mansplaining Lolita; NSA backdoor in Juniper Network…

via Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow January 1, 2026

[RIDGELINE] Happy New Year With a Side of Fries

Ridgeline subscribers — Hello from Denny’s. Happy new year. You can tell it’s January first, because I’m at Denny’s. I woke up and made a nice coffee and did some accounting (as one does) and went to my local shrine in Tokyo and bowbowclapclapbow’d and the…

via Craig Mod — Writer + Photographer January 1, 2026

Generated by openring