"This week the buzz in CLI Magic is all about symbolic links. As you can tell from the name, symbolic links are not real links, and their behavior reflects that. Using symbolic links lets you more easily do all sorts of neat things, not the least of which is to satisfy dependency issues for needy applications. But before we get into that, we'll go over the basics. You need to understand both inodes and real links in order to grok symbolic links.
"Real links--aka 'hard' links--simply provide another way to access to the same file, the same data in a file system. The kernel keeps track of files through the use of inodes rather than filenames. Filenames are for wimps, like human users. The kernel don't need no steenkin filenames..."
