Symbolic Links & Hard Links

Before digging in further, let’s discuss a few concepts which a programmer must be familiar with.

This lesson is entirely dedicate to links but to understand links, you must have an idea of what an inode means. An inode is basically a link that points to the actual content or data. A file in the file system actually points to this inode instead of pointing directly to data.

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What are Symbolic Links?

Just like there are shortcuts in Windows and alias in Mac, symbolic links (aka Soft Link) is a file referring to another file. You can think of it as a pointer pointing to a another memory location just like in C++. If you delete the link, it will not affect the original file.

Note:

The symbolic link of a file will not work anymore, and hence become a “dangling” link if you move that file to another location.

In Linux, you can create a soft link using ln command.