Symbolic Links
Let's talk about another type of link between files, the symbolic link.
There is one other type of link that is really useful, and it is called a symbolic link or sometimes a soft link. Hard links are somewhat limited as you can’t create one to a directory, for fear that you will create a cycle in the directory tree. You can’t hard link to files in other disk partitions, etc., because inode numbers are only unique within a particular file system, not across file systems. Thus, a new type of link called
Creating a symbolic link
To create such a link, you can use the same program ln
, but with the -s
flag. Here is an example: