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.