The K Desktop Environment

7.2. Symbolic Links

You can use the facilities provided by the underlying operating system to simplify your administration tasks. One such facility is symbolic links. Let's say you have two large groups of users: a PR department needs a presentation program StrongPoint in the Applications menu group; and an Accounting department users are not supposed to use any programs from the Internet menu group, and they need an accounting program ACC++ in the Applications menu group. You could log in as each individual user and make the changes using KMenuedit. Or you could simplify your task by making the changes just once for both groups, and then copy the new .desktop files to the home directories of PR department and Accounting department groups.

However, the best long-term solution is this: make the changes using KMenuedit for a single user of each group. Create a directory owned by root somewhere within the filesystem (for instance in /var/kde/usermenus/PRdepartment/). Move the new .desktop files to that directory. Create symbolic links from each home directory of PR department users pointing to the /var/kde/usermenus/PRdepartment/ directory.[1]. Do the same for the Accounting department.

If you'll need to make changes to menu system for PR department later on, you can just make those changes for a single user and move new .desktop files to /var/kde/usermenus/PRdepartment. No further action is neccessary, because the existing symbolic links will carry forward the new files into home directory of each PR department user.

Notes

[1]

You can learn detailed information about creating, deleting and editing of symbolic links in the documentation of your system. Look for man pages for "ln".