Symbolic links rock

I've used symbolic links (symlink or soft link) in the past, but recently I've started to realize their potential in two ways.

First, I keep almost all of my files in version control repositories, but I often want to use those files in a project that is not hosted in the repository. With centralized version control I was often copying files between my repo and source trees until I realized I can make a symbolic link between the file in my checked-out repository and where that file belongs in my source tree. Now I can work directly in my source tree and not have to remember to make copies to my repository; I just go to the repository to commit/update, and the symlinks automatically propagate the file data.

Second, when testing an improvement to a program I run an unmodified and modified program using the same input data. Sometimes I have to vary the input data, for example to cover a bunch of test cases or to do random input testing. Managing the input data sets can become tedious. One way to make my life easier is to generate the input data in a single location and make symlinks to the input data for each of my programs. Then a script easily can create input data, run the test programs, archive the input data and results, and repeat.