How To Create SAP Symbolic Links

admin

5 years ago

In this article we will discuss the concept of symbolic link,its relation with SAP directory structure and how to Create Symbolic Links in SAP for third party tools.

What Is Symbolic Link

Symbolic links also known as soft links is simply a file which does not contain any data and points to the another file.
This concept is similar to ‘shortcut’ in Windows operating system.

SAP System Directories and Symbolic Link

SAP system has three types of directories :

Local Directories
Physically shared Directories
Logically shared Directories

Local Directories:

Local directories in SAP system are the one which are present locally i.e on local host.
e.g.

/usr/sap/<SAPSID>/DVEBMGS<nr>/
/usr/sap/<SAPSID>/D<nr>
/usr/sap/<SAPSID>/ASCS<nr>

Physically shared Directories

Physically shared directories, reside on the SAP Global host, defined by profile parameter SAPGLOBALHOST.
e.g.

/sapmnt/<SAPSID>/global
/sapmnt/<SAPSID>/profile
/sapmnt/<SAPSID>/exe

Logically shared Directories:

Logically shared directories reside on LOCAL host and has symbolic links to the GLOBAL host.
By default, SAP installer creates directory /usr/sap/<SAPSID>/SYS on each host.

For e.g :

Symbolic link profile points to /<sapmnt>/<SAPSID>/profile
Symbolic link global points to /<sapmnt>/<SAPSID>/global
exe subdirectory in this global directory points to /<sapmnt>/<SAPSID>/exe on the SAP global host

Symbolic link uc (for Unicode) points to /<sapmnt>/<SAPSID>/exe/uc.

How To Create Symbolic Links in SAP

Many times, we need to create symbolic links while integrating third party tools with SAP.
We will take an example of creating symbolic links from 3rd party backup tool called NetBackup to SAP kernel directory.
Here we need to create sysmbolic link /sapmnt/DEV/exe/backint to /usr/openv/netbackup/bin/backint

Syntax for achieving this is as below:

$ ln -s {source-filename} {symbolic-filename}

In our case,
First login using SIDADM and go to Kernel Directory:

#cd /sapmnt/DEV/exe
#ln -s /usr/openv/netbackup/bin/backint

Verification:

We can verify the symbolic link we created simply by issuing list command.

#ls -lrt *backint*

Output will be similar like this:

lrwxrwxrwx 202/200 32 Dec 4 16.32 2019 /sapmnt/DEV/exe/backint symbolic link to /usr/openv/netbackup/bin/backint