ln -s: from one source to many destinations

You can't do this with a single invocation of ln,but you could loop through all necessary destinations:

$ for i in "$HOME/Documents/" "$HOME/Desktop/"; do ln -s "$HOME/file" "$i"; done

If you have gnu parallel you could try with

parallel ln -s /path/file {} ::: /path/dest1 /path/dest2 /path/dest3

or, to symlink multiple targets to (the same) multiple destinations

parallel ln -s {1} {2} ::: /path/file1 /path/file2 ::: /path/dest1 /path/dest2

It's no less verbose than two separate ln -s invocations:

echo $HOME/Documents/ $HOME/Desktop/ | xargs -n 1 ln -s $HOME/file

but that only works for absolute paths (because symbolic links are interpreted relative to their parent directory, unless they're absolute).

(The relative cost drops of course as the number of links goes up. Also, this snippet relies on the fact that $HOME doesn't contain any spaces, tabs or newlines.)