Linux symlinks pointing outside of Dropbox folder -- can I keep them without syncing their targets?

[acfc]

I've noticed that my Dropbox icon is constantly syncing, which led me to this forum to investigate. I have a feeling it's related to how I'm using symlinks in my Dropbox folder, though I haven't found a question here that quite fits my needs.

What I have is a directory like Dropbox/projects, and this only contains symlinks out to project directories on local storage. I don't want to sync these external project files (which is the common use case I see described on the forum), instead, I just want the symlinks to sit there so I can follow them locally into various projects. What is the best approach?

One idea I have is to use the command line interface (which I just discovered) to exclude the symlinks. So this command

   dropbox exclude add Dropbox/projects/*

seems to work just fine. However, I have another nested set of symlinks that I would need to exclude as well, preferably like this:

    dropbox exclude add Dropbox/clients/*/projects/*

where the first * would be a wild card to match all client directories with any name (and then, I want to ignore the symlinks inside the projects directory for each client if that makes sense). However, this doesn't seem to match any files so I have a feeling the * isn't working as expected.

Anyway, would love some guidance on this, hopefully I can get the syncing to stop running non-stop!

Thanks!

[acfc]

Oh, I figured out the second question there about the * pattern not working... I had the path in quotes and when I removed the quotes it matched all of the files I wanted just fine :). However, I'm still getting the constant syncing so I'll keep investigating.

[acfc · Accepted solution]

Ok, I've figured out that this had nothing at all to do with symlinks! The real problem was that I had a couple instances of VSCode open, which added a ton of files to the system watchers limit. I closed everything down, restarted my laptop, and the syncing finished as expected. Then I "unexcluded" all of the symlinks I had excluded initially, and they sync just fine (not syncing their target content, just existing as pointers to directories).