Hard and Soft Links

Use ln to manage soft and hard links

Inodes

• An inode is a reference to a file on the disk
• The stat command can be used to view inodes
• When there are 0 links to an inode, the data itself is erased from the disk
• Hard links point to the same inode

Links

• You can only hardlink to files, not directories
• You cannot hardlink to files on a mount, only files on the same filesystem
• Soft links create a shortcut directly to the file, rather than a link to the inode
• readlink can be used to view the file behind a softlink
• broken soft links are highlighted in red in the output of ls -l