Create symlink - overwrite if one exists

This is the purpose of ln's -f option: it removes existing destination files, if any, before creating the link.

ln -sf /path/to/data/folder/month/date/hour/minute/file /path/to/recent/file

will create the symlink /path/to/recent/file pointing to /path/to/data/folder/month/date/hour/minute/file, replacing any existing file or symlink to a file if necessary (and working fine if nothing exists there already).

If a directory, or symlink to a directory, already exists with the target name, the symlink will be created inside it (so you'd end up with /path/to/recent/file/file in the example above). The -n option, available in some versions of ln, will take care of symlinks to directories for you, replacing them as necessary:

ln -sfn /path/to/data/folder/month/date/hour/minute/file /path/to/recent/file

POSIX ln doesn’t specify -n so you can’t rely on it generally. Much of ln’s behaviour is implementation-defined so you really need to check the specifics of the system you’re using. If you’re using GNU ln, you can use the -t and -T options too, to make its behaviour fully predictable in the presence of directories (i.e. fail instead of creating the link inside the existing directory with the same name).

Please read the manual.

ln -sfn /new/target /path/to/symlink

$ man ln

-n, --no-dereference
treat LINK_NAME as a normal file if it is a symbolic link to a directory