Creating Links: Hard Links & Symlinks
Reference one file from many places. Learn the difference between hard links and symbolic links, how to create them with ln, and when to use each.
What is a Link?
A link lets more than one name point to file data. Linux supports two kinds: hard links and symbolic (soft) links.
Inodes: The Real File
On disk, a file is an inode holding the data and metadata. A filename is just a directory entry pointing to an inode. This is the key to understanding links.
All lessons in this course
- Viewing File Content (cat, less, head, tail)
- Understanding File Permissions (chmod, chown)
- Searching for Files (find, grep)
- Creating Links: Hard Links & Symlinks