Symlinked Dotfiles Are Not Working I'm on macOS Catalina and I'm trying to move all my "dotfiles" into a folder, where I can place them under version control, then symlink them back  into the home folder.  I've created a hidden ".dotfiles" folder within the home folder, moved the dotfiles into it, then symlinked them back into the home folder with:

ln -s &lt;dotfile name&gt; ..


However, terminal complains that the commands associated with those dotfiles are no longer found.  I'm not sure what exactly I'm doing wrong, but any help would be greatly appreciated.
Your ln syntax is wrong, which is leading to self-referential symbolic links. For example:

% mkdir .dotfiles
% cd .dotfiles/
% touch .foo
% ln -s .foo ..
% cd ..
% ls -l .foo
lrwxr-xr-x  1 tph  wheel  4 Dec  5 10:38 .foo@ -&gt; .foo


At this point .foo exists but it's a symlink to itself, not to the copy in .dotfiles.

Probably the easiest way to do it is to cd ~ and make the symlinks from there:

% cd ~
% ln -s .dotfiles/.foo .
% ls -l .foo 
lrwxr-xr-x  1 tph  wheel  14 Dec  5 10:46 .foo@ -&gt; .dotfiles/.foo