I am currently researching a Dropbox-based preference syncing solution for Mac OS X. In my research, I came across a really handy terminal tip. If you want to symbolically link (ln –s source target) a file or folder to another location that follows a named pattern, such as com.adobe.*, you can supply the pattern for the link source parameter.

For example, running this command:

iMac:DropBoxPreferenceSync brandon$ ln -s ~/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.* .

And then calling a file listing, will result in this:

iMac:DropBoxPreferenceSync brandon$ ls -l
total 288
lrwxr-xr-x  1 brandon  wheel  62 Mar  2 09:21 com.adobe.Acrobat.Pro.plist -> /Users/brandon/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.Acrobat.Pro.plist
lrwxr-xr-x  1 brandon  wheel  70 Mar  2 09:21 com.adobe.Acrobat.Pro_x86_8.0.plist -> /Users/brandon/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.Acrobat.Pro_x86_8.0.plist
lrwxr-xr-x  1 brandon  wheel  70 Mar  2 09:21 com.adobe.Acrobat.Pro_x86_9.0.plist -> /Users/brandon/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.Acrobat.Pro_x86_9.0.plist
lrwxr-xr-x  1 brandon  wheel  66 Mar  2 09:21 com.adobe.AdobeOnlineHelp.plist -> /Users/brandon/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.AdobeOnlineHelp.plist
lrwxr-xr-x  1 brandon  wheel  66 Mar  2 09:21 com.adobe.CSXSPreferences.plist -> /Users/brandon/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.CSXSPreferences.plist
lrwxr-xr-x  1 brandon  wheel  63 Mar  2 09:21 com.adobe.DNGConverter.plist -> /Users/brandon/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.DNGConverter.plist
lrwxr-xr-x  1 brandon  wheel  59 Mar  2 09:21 com.adobe.InDesign.plist -> /Users/brandon/Library/Preferences/com.adobe.InDesign.plist

etc…

One note, if you are linking the files to your current folder, remember to add the final period (com.adobe.* .), otherwise it will generate a weird linking situation where the OS will report “too many symbolic links”. I hope this comes in handy for you!