Links

In Unixlike OS'es, there are two type of links: hard links and "soft" (or symbolic) links.

Soft links, aka symbolic links or "symlinks", are roughly analogous to MS Windows' "shortcuts" - they are complete files in their own right which serve as pointers. For example, a symlink might serve to say to the filesystem, "if you're looking for /usr/bin/myprogram, go to /usr/sbin/myprogram".

Hard links make a copy of the metadata for the file that is linked - there is still only one set of the actual data for the file, but there are now directory entries in two places which reference it.

Both hard and soft links are created using the ln command.