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Comment by throwaway744678 | Hacker News Reader

Ha! My trick is to

  ln -s a b

then look at the link with ls -l, then remove my garbage! Your way is much better.

I just do it the one way, get the error that the destination already exists, then swap them.

I think most people just feel this is risky. What if you overwrite your file? If it was a cp command, that's what would happen.

Me too, I was starting to think I was the crazy one after reading the other comments :)

Except if b is a directory, then ln -s a b will create a symlink at b/a which points to a.