[ Thanks to Jamie
Adams for this link. ]
“First of all, what is a link? Most desktop users use
‘shortcuts’ but in the underlying file system they are actually
links. For example, ‘File A’ resides in the document folder and
‘File B’ is created on the desktop but actually points to ‘File
A’.“Another common implementation is for backward compatibility.
Consider an application which was compiled and associated with a
specific shared library. When a new version of the library is
installed, the older application still looks for the previous
shared library. The new shared library has all of the objects as
before but to keep the older application from barfing a link is
created. Consider the following:”