I previously wrote about moving your /Applications folder to your media partition, and suggested that you could probably move individual application to your /var/root instead of the whole kaboodle.
But I’ve just experimented some, and it’s a fairly big hassle to do this for each application you want to do this for. Plus what happens when an update is available ? My guess is the whole directory is replaced, possibly destroying the symlink and installing it once more into your original Applications directory. I didn’t try to find out, though. I only had 3 megs left on my root partition, time to take action.
So I finally moved the whole directory to /var/root, the biiiig partition where you get lots of diskspace. I did try a variation though, by leaving a vestigial, thoroughly cleaned out /Applications directory instead of deleting it, but the symbolic link creation failed because the file already existed. I figured if ever anything went wrong with the moved /Applications folder, I would have still had the original one. But this does not work, so I’ve followed the original instructions, removed my /Applications directory and created the symbolic link to the new one in one go. Everything works fine after a reboot !
I was hoping for what I did when I was using Gentoo, but that was actually more playing around with mounting partitions. When working with partitions, you can have a folder with content in it, and then you can mount another partition using the folder as link point. When the partition is mounted, the original folder contents are no longer accessible. But when you unmount the partition, the original folder contents become accessible again !