Linux.com: CLI Magic: Symbolic Links
Sep 01, 2004, 08:30 (3 Talkback[s])
"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..."
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